On a personal note, I’ve voted both democratic and republican in the past. I am not a liberal nor a conservative, though I’ve voted democratic about 2/3 of the time.
That said, I am not looking for a debate, nor an argument. I’d like a serious answer without hate spewing! I’m looking for a reason 53% of the US does not support Obama. Most forums I find have posts like “Obama is a Muslim!” or some far flung conspiracy theory. Others have posts so unintelligible they must have been written by a six year old. (I believe if you can’t write coherently, you are not intelligent enough to have the opinion you’re expressing. “Obaba sucks WORS PREZ Evar!” is NOT a valid statement nor opinion!)
So, since he took office:
A useless war has ended (though security remains)
The DJIA has risen 3000 points
The U.S. recession has been declared over (though I know residual effects remain, especially for those who lost work during it)
His bailout plans have saved GM and Chrysler.
If you voted for him and NOW you dislike him, you might disagree with his health care plan, spending policies, stances on abortion, stem cells, or Guantanamo. But he has NOT changed on these issues since being elected. He passed a health care bill like he said he would. He passed a Wall Street bill like he said he would. He’s done what he was elected to do. So why wouldn’t the SAME percentage of people who voted for him still support him now?
If you did NOT support him before the election or now, you probably disagree with his spending practices or health care plan (as I find on most forums). Here’s what I don’t get: Bush spent over 1 trillion on wars. Bush’s bank bailout was almost as high as Obama’s bailout. So for spending purposes your candidate was no better! On the stock market, Bush LOST 2500 points over his terms (12/12/2000 - 1/16/2009). Lastly, on health care it’s a REPUBLICANidea that everyone should have it.
I don’t like the spending either and I would have voted against all bailouts and the Iraq war had I been consulted. But why the double standard on Obama?
Voted for him, don’t hate him, would rather have had Hilary. One of the things I, and probably many others, did not like about Hilary was her health care plan. Obama’s sure sounded better when he was campaigning, but it was one of the things I was against. Too fast, too much fat–about every other page of that bill creates some other committee or council to study some problem, and it ties into many other pieces of legislation, for instance the Internal Revenue Code. It’s very cumbersome.
I’m not sure GM and Chrysler should have been saved. Wasn’t Chrysler saved once before? Lot of good that did.
Basically, I am not wild about Obama’s leadership. Since being sworn in he is playing a new game, not his strongest one, and whatever he’s doing has led to more divisiveness. Some of this may be down to his appointees, but they are his appointees. I guess it’s really hard to be the media’s darling one day, and the next day they are waiting to pounce on anything, but other presidents have adapted.
So really, he’s just like any politician, seemed one way on the campaign trail, altogether different once in office. I’m sure I’d be just as disillusioned with Hilary, but at least she would have come with Bill.
He got a health care bill enacted into law, but it was not the health care legislation he promised, not even close. He was able to get the stimulus passed, but it was weak, and not nearly what was required to truly jump-start the economy. The Republicans fought him on the amount and he caved. On Wall Street, he should have let some of those big wigs sink. AIG was a disaster that could have been seen a mile away by a blind man, but not only were they bailed out, they snubbed their noses at their benefactors and gave bonuses to staff anyway. Stem Cells was a no-brainer, but it is still in limbo. Guantanamo? Hah! When’s that ever going to happen? DADT? He’s fighting that. He won’t step into the Gay Marriage issue. He hasn’t tackled Immigration, and probably won’t now that the Republicans control the House. Mostly what I see Obama doing is pandering to the Republicans, which he’s been doing since day 1. Of course he can get on his hands and knees and kiss the Republican’s boots and they’d still kick him in the teeth, but it doesn’t seem to matter to him. How much do you want to bet he extends all the Bush tax cuts? Yeah, the deficit and debt are monstrous, but we can’t piss off the Republicans by taking away the tax cuts on the wealthiest 2% of society. He doesn’t have a clue what to do with Afghanistan, even though it is obvious that we should pull out of there, like yesterday. It’s not going to get any better with American troops there because we’re involved in the kind of war we don’t know how to fight. Let’s just admit it and come home already. He can’t even get his appointments made. Vacancies still exist after two years. There’s just no excuse for all of this.
Obama came into office with a true mandate to get things done. He campaigned on change and he had an opportunity to enact it. He blew that opportunity by wasting two years trying to figure out how to get the Republicans to work with him. I just don’t get it. He should have done what any Republican president would have in his situation, attempt to ram through everything in his agenda. He’s become the epitome of the stereotypical milquetoast Democrat.
Over the next two years, I predict nothing the Democrats want will get passed, and the Republicans, being who they are, will be able to advance their agenda a little further, by making things more difficult for Hispanic immigrants, putting more road-blocks in front of the LGBT community to prevent them from achieving equality, whittling a little more of women’s rights to control their own biology, halting stem cell research on cells that can never become life and will ultimately have to be destroyed, ensuring the gap between the rich and poor becomes even wider, removing as much regulation on corporations as they can, dismissing scientific research to continue to pander to the Religious Right and now the Tea Party, and in 2012, we’ll be faced with a choice between evil and incompetence, and I’m afraid I’ll have no choice but to vote for incompetence or sit on my hands. That’s how bad I think things are, and how disappointed in Obama I am at this point.
Ditto, although my % is higher towards independents and republicans.
The ‘useless war’ was already scheduled to end before Obama even took his oath. At best, he gets credit for not fucking up the withdraw Bush had planned.
The President has little control over the economy. Things go in cycles. The recession would have ended and Dow would have gone up regardless of who was in office. Congress and the Fed can accelerate recovery, or make things worse, but even so their ability is limited. It’s VERY questionable if anything Congress did helpped. The fed probably did help, but they hit a brick wall on how far they can influence things. And Obama had almost nothing to do with either Congress or Fed actions. The same is true of your posting Dow figures for Bush by the way. You give both Bush and Obama far too much credit here.
You finally found something that Obama can be credited/blamed for. Now can you convince me it was a good thing?
As for why I dislike him, hate is far too strong a word, it’s that he is not a leader. He has grand ideas in his speeches (or at least used to), but he doesn’t do anything about them.
He asked Congress to pass a healthcare bill, then sat on his ass and let them fuck it all up. As a result, the health care reform we were promised in the election is nothing like what we got. What we got is so damned complex, takes so long to take effect, and does so little that really we probably would have been better with nothing being changed.
He did the same thing on the stimulus. He said he wanted one then sat back and let Congress turn it into a pork barrel vote buyoff spoils to the victor thing. By Obama’s own standards, it’s a miserable failure. Most of the money went to crap that had nothing to do with the economy. If he were a leader, he might have stepped in and strongarmed congress to keep things reasonable, but he didn’t.
He wants to close Gitmo. But he can’t find someone else to do it for him. And since he can’t seem to do anything himself, that’s the end of that conversation. Gitmo will remain open until we get a President with enough balls to actually be a leader.
Same with DADT. He should have written an executive order abolishing DADT his first day, then look at Congress and go “I’m the leader of the military, screw your bigoted law. We can turn this into a Constitutional issue if you want, but I’m the commander in chief and I command homosexuals be allowed to serve.” But he didn’t. DADT is ending, and Obama has, if anything, stood in the way of that.
He focused his efforts on things that, currently, America doesn’t need. We need the economy to recover. We need jobs. We need regulations to keep things from getting so messed up again. And he has totally ignored that. Instead, we got a year long fight over health care (and almost nothing to show for it). We also got two years of “But republicans are cockblocking us.” Democrats had both sides of Congress and the Presidency, but all they did was desperately hope voters didn’t realize that.
As for the spending, I actually don’t mind that. When the country is in bad times, it makes sense for the government to step in and spend more. Later, when times are good, we’ll have to pay off that spending of course. But for the time being, I want government to EXPAND social safety nets while Americans are getting economically boned, not cut them. My problem with the money is, as I mentioned above, it wasn’t used to actually help Americans. Trillions of dollars spent helping people would be fine, trillions of dollars wasted on worthless crap is not.
Not the it’s relevant to a thread about Obama, but I’m really getting tired of this bullshit claim. Only 20 Republicans put forward the idea and supported it. This was at a time when there were over 280 Republicans in Congress. It takes some real political blindness to call only 7% of republicans supporting the thing a ‘republican plan’. (# of republican supporters buried, without the obvious conclusion it did not have widespread republican support, in this article)
The war ended on the same time scale as the preceding president.
The DJIA is a weighted average of the top 30 companies and it was reconfigured in 2009 to replace GM and Citicorp so the number has no relationship to earlier years.
“Recession” is a flavorful soundbite to roll over the tongue but it has no nutritional value to the unemployed.
I’m a fiscal conservative and will vote for anybody who at least pretends to know what the word “budget” means. I have been sorely disappointed in both parties for this reason.
I feel no love for tax-and-spend in general, but what I see at this point in Obama and his party is a militant refusal to understand that as permanent unemployment grows and wages fall, there is simply no money left in people’s pockets to pay the usual cartel-imposed price tag for non-essential and exorbitantly priced services like healthcare, government and similar.
If you have a salary of $80K, you can afford to be scammed. You can afford to pay double and triple in the hospital to help out non-paying indigents and to keep the doctor living in his fancy mansion making couple of times more than French equivalents, all at the same time. You can afford to pay for insurance that would cover this scam - Americans did it for years. But now things are changing - wages are down, employment is down, there is not much disposable income left. If you work for hourly wage and you are lucky to have a 40 hour week all paid up, you will have trouble paying rent, let alone cover the healthcare shakedown business. Now, folks like you in India or China probably make comparable amount of money, but over there nobody is shaking them down to pay for healthcare at rates based on the time when America was rich.
So, what to do? The costs have to come down. It should somehow dawn upon the highly paid employees of the various government sponsored cartels, be that medical, government itself, education etc, that they personally will not survive the economic collapse of the country, regardless of what is solemnly promised in their union contracts and so forth.
But, yeah, tell it to the commie wrecker called Dumbak Barama. He is got a better idea - a flat healthcare tax on everybody regardless of income, raises for government workers, plans to further hobble private sector through cap-and-trade “environmental” shakedown and so forth. Continuation of insane foreign wars began under Bush, regardless of how they get renamed. Scaling down of military defense capability especially through reductions of the nuclear forces. The debt ballooning so much to pay for useless shit that nobody is lending nowadays, to the point of them openly printing (err, quantitatively easing) money.
In short, my expectation is that this guy will finish what Bush has started in terms of destroying the country. He is either the last straw or one of the very last ones.
Thanks all for the answers. A few of you found my own reason for disliking him - he has spent all his time trying to get republicans to work with him rather than get his agenda accomplished. A few of you had other very valid reasons I had not considered which is all I was really after.
In the primaries I had both a democrat and a republican higher on my list than he was. In the end I voted for him. I’m disappointed, but I do not regret the vote.
I think rational people all across the political spectrum have reasons to dislike him.
People who are fairly apolotical to liberal/conservative issues might not like how he spent his entire first year focusing on health care instead of job creation. I’m liberal and even though I know health reform is necessary for the US’s long term fiscal survival, it bothers me that jobs really weren’t a priority for the Obama admin in 2009. The dems lost the midterms due to the poor job situation, but they put almost no effort into job creation in 2009. They did the stimulus, which was good (a bit small though). And they tried aid to states but I don’t think they were seen as trying hard enough to create a job friendly environment.
Conservatives who dislike him for rational reasons that I know talk about how they feel his policies involve gov. intrustion into the market, which they dislike. The 1 trillion plus deficit is a problem too.
But as a liberal you said that Obama hasn’t changed his policies since being elected. That isn’t true. Obama ran on a policy of standing up to plutocracy and oligarchy, but once elected cut tons of deals with the plutocrats and oligarchs instead of standing up to them. He ran on standing up to health insurance and pharma companies. But once elected he cut them nice deals offering them tens of billions in subsidies (in one form or another) if they didn’t block his health reform legislation.
Plus Obama has no backbone. Back in the mid 90s he was asked (when running for the IL state senate) what his view was on gay marriage. He said he was ok with it. Now that he is president he backpedaled. He supported single payer health care in 2003, then backed off of that.
So as a liberal there are good reasons to not like him. He seems to be an inept politician who is unable/unwilling to stand up to entrenched financial interests. You can slap him in the face and he won’t fight back, but he will bend over backwards to distance himself from his own past positions. He seems to be hopelessly naive.
I don’t know that I hate anyone. So this is what I don’t like about the Obama administration:
They have done one thing consistently - grow government. I continually witness the fatal flaw of government - there is simply very little remedy for corruption. People will be corrupt - that is a given, and when they are, I want to be able to dissasociate myself from them. Government really does not give you this option.
I voted for him and I still support him but with a lot less enthusiasm than I had when i voted for him and here’s why.
His health care plan did NOT do what was advertised. I wasn’t sold on his health care plan simply because it would give more people health insurance and reduce the number of health related bankruptcies. I was sold on the idea of bending the cost curve in health care. I wanted something that was going to at least take a step towards dealing with the medicare entitlement problem. Didn’t happen and we got the part of health care reform that was going to COST us money without ANY of the parts that was going to SAVE us money.
He has not been nearly as transparent or transformative as he promised to be.
He compromised too much and got too little (e.g. NOTHING) for his compromises.
His Wall Street bill was so watered down that if you had asked wall street lobbyists to draft a bill in 2008, they would have had to come up with a tougher bill than what we got in 2010.
He spent too much political capital on health care and not enough on fixing the economy and on financial regulation.
He’s just been very disappointing. He was going to be accused of shoving things down the republican throats no matter what he did, it would have been nice if he actually shoved something down their throats instead of asking them what they would like to have shoved down their throats.