Every goddamn thread in this forum. Blah blah blah Obama bad blah blah blah.
You know who definitely WILL NOT be a candidate in 2016? Barack Obama.
Quite a lot of them generated by the paid-for-by-the-Koch-Brothers Republican noise machine. The money they have spent to Get That Uppity Kenyan Socialist Muzzlem out of God’s White House could have put man back on the moon.
Speculation.
Still no examples from adaher. He has nothing, or at least nothing that hasn’t been examined and refuted or is large enough not be laughed out of court.
Still, it’s not really about Obama. It’s about America’s destiny and America’s strength. Thanks to health care reform, hospital mistakes are down 17%. They are still too high for this great country. But we’re off to an impressive start. Over in Iraq, we’ve gotten rid of that clown Maleki and Baghdad has secured an agreement with the Kurds. Experts in counterinsurgency understand that there are no military solutions – ultimately they are political. They don’t occur by magic or by shipboard photo ops. They require hard work.
And that’s what it’s about. Hard work. Applied expertise rather than simpering ideology. So let the Tea Partiers wander around the streets dressed like Napoleon. Let the aging Fox News audience get jizzed up by a transparent storyline. Democrats understand the importance of science, expertise and facts.
FWIW, I’ve never given money to Hillary in any campaign, but I just got a “Ready for Hillary 2016” kit that included a small poster, four postcards, a bumper sticker, six small lapel stickers, and a cover letter from “Craig T. Smith, Senior Adviser.” It’s glossy and slick and can’t have been cheap. I won’t be contributing just yet; I’d rather wait and see how the 2016 Democratic field shapes up.
Actually that is a myth and was an act Reagan put on as this documentary shows.
Most of this appears to be political partisanship. It’s the kind of “hackery” you were crtitcal of earlier.
Much of the outcomes you spin as positive have yet to be proven so. At least they have yet to be proven as long term positives. Yes, Obama got the stimulus through. This is a successful political outcome, but as a policy it has not been proven a success. We dont know the alternative results had different policies been chosen. He prevented a 2nd Great Depression? Again you are exaggerating his achievements. We have no idea if a 2nd Great Depression was in fact on its way. Nevertheless, a nice rhetorical flourish on your part.
Obama reformed Healthcare. Yes, he did. Once again we have no idea how successful this reform will prove to be in the long term.
The budget deficit is even in decline? Im not sure why you needed to add the word “even” here. In fact its downright bizarre to use it. Budget deficits often go down during an economic upturn and increase during a recession. It’s also no surprise the deficit is going down when you have a massive but temporary spending stimulus for 4 years and then stop the spending stimulus and increase taxes. It would take an absolute incompetent *not *to reduce the deficit in such circumstances. The major issue on the deficit is that the US still has an official budget deficit of 2.8%(the real budget deficit is in fact larger depending on how its counted). A budget deficit of such a size is not so great if the US is currently at, or near, the top of the economic cycle. In fact such deficit percentages are precisely what got so many European countries into trouble in the lead up to the Euro crisis. All this and a real unemployment rate that whilst in decline remains stubbornly high.
Most of Obama’s policies are still only part way through their appraisal period.
Well there was a heaping portion of rhetoric. But I stand behind my substantive claims.
Um, no. Really. No. It was not a successful political outcome, if by that you mean it was popular. It was not. (The bill was signed, if that’s what you meant by successful).
But among professional macroeconomic forecasters there’s no controversy: the stimulus worked. They don’t jabber on the boob tube much and they are not invited on to the Sunday talk shows. They simply apply textbook economics. Cite.
As for preventing a 2nd Great Depression: yes, this happened. No joke. Depressions are caused by a severe shortage of aggregate demand. The Federal Reserve had run out of ammunition. And during 2008-2009, the financial system froze (then thawed, then froze, etc.)
Of course there’s a caveat. Ten years ago I would have rolled my eyes or maybe giggled at such a claim. “Sure”, I would have said: “Obama prevented catastrophe. But so would basically any other sitting President. Bush II, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon and Kennedy all responded to recession with stimulus programs. We didn’t know what we were doing in 1929, but now we do. So what? There will never again be a Great Depression. As Nixon said with accuracy: “We are all Keynesians”; textbook economics isn’t all that controversial. Heck even Milton Friedman defended the New Deal as an emergency measure: he just thought that it wouldn’t have been necessary if the Fed had done its job.”
I was wrong. I didn’t understand 2 things:
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It’s in the interest of the minority to sabotage the economy: they don’t have to necessarily push for policies (eg tax cuts) that they use to fight recession. Remember, the stimulus was about 1/2 tax cuts and received zero Republican support. Furthermore, McConnell realized that bipartisanship disproportionately benefits the party in power. So I had fundamentally misinterpreted our political system.
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But I also didn’t understand the political appeal of austerity and the difficulty of passing huge stimulus packages. #1 was specific to the US, but the fact remains that we had less austerity than Europe.
So another Great Depression can reoccur. The 2008-2014 experience has been illuminating. (I’ve left efforts to prop the financial system out of this discussion, because they are weedier, though they follow a similar theme: once I would have said that any administration would have rescued the economy. I can’t say that anymore.)
I stand behind my other claims as well. But this point is so important that I’ll leave things here. I can amplify the above or comment on HCR if you want.
Kevin Drum scrolls through some charts on employment growth and private employment growth during the Bush and Obama administrations. Governmental jobs (state and federal) expanded during the Bush years and contracted during the Obama years. So the private-alone employment chart favors Obama much more. In both cases the Obama recovery has been stronger by that metric.
Much of this is driven by the depth of the recession that Obama inherited, and the feebleness of the Bush expansion (compared with the 1990s as well). Kevin presents 2 charts but you really need a fuller set to get a grip on what happened.
Good short profile of Hillary by Peter Baker in the NYT: Hillary Clinton’s History as First Lady: Powerful, but Not Always Deft - The New York Times
One thing I wonder about is if some Democrats might stay out of the race because they won’t have a friendly Congress. I think that’s what’s motivating Liz Warren to stay out. I don’t see how there’s any purpose to a Warren Presidency without the ability to pass major legislation. Any Democratic President succeeding Obama will be an executive in the narrowest sense of the term: they will be tasked with carrying out the laws of the land and conducting the nation’s foreign policy. Any Democrat who has dreams of major legislation can just forget about it.
I don’t think that would keep any ambitious politico from running, not for an instant. Even when facing a hostile Congress, the President runs the Federal bureaucracy, makes lots of appointments (including, arguably most importantly, to the Supreme Court), conducts foreign policy as you noted, is CINC of the most powerful military in the world, has an enormous impact on public policy, and is guaranteed a place in the history books.
That’s extremely important stuff, but if your goal is to fundamentally change America, you can’t do that without legislation. What would a Liz Warren do as President other than complain about the Republican Congress not doing what she wants?
According to other polls, it has hit a new low.
Cite.
And
Cite.
Your distinction between personal animosity and disapproval is unfalsifiable and meaningless.
Regards,
Shodan
Gallup’s daily poll is far more instructive then the few-and-far-between polls from conservative outfits, in my view.
LOL. Are all statements of opinion meaningless, or just mine?
It is funny when you say that, because most Americans DO have that personal bias against the President. THe idea that he’s doing a good job is a minority view.
Your personal bias is not the same as thinking he’s not doing a good job. You’ve admitted your strong personal negative feelings for the man.
Yes, but it’s not as if my complaints about him are particularly novel. I’ve been pretty consistent about how important I think managerial competence and experience are when selecting a President. I’ve praised Clinton’s competence at this part of the job and slammed Bush’s. I’m not really excited about the idea of Marco Rubio or Rand Paul for President at this point in their careers for that reason. It’s not a partisan thing.
I get that for many of you, he has legislative accomplishments, which makes him a success even if the government has become more dysfunctional under his watch. I just happen to think that this less glamorous aspect of the job is more important, and cannot judge Obama to be a success until the trains start running on time, so to speak.
So in my view, we’ll have deal with 16 years of the performance of our government going down the toilet when the next election comes up. The top priority should be electing someone who can improve the government’s performance in its day-to-day operations.
You haven’t been consistent when applying these to Obama. Obama has more valid managerial (and other) experience for the Presidency than everyone on earth but 2 living people.
I don’t think it’s a partisan thing for you – I think it’s an anti-Obama thing for you. I don’t think you’re able to objectively look at anything related to Obama – any time you do, I believe the anti-Obama part of you takes over and scrambles for a way to explain it in a way that reflects poorly on him.
No, I don’t buy that, in day-to-day operation, it’s become “more dysfunctional”. Politics has become more dysfunctional, and I think he’s made a bunch of mistakes on the politics of getting things done, but that’s very different from managing the government.
I think you’re unable to talk about such things objectively. I think you ignore any examples of “trains running on time” and only the outliers remain.
I’ve also noted that GWB had a lot of experience but his performance was poor, consistently poor. Obama has not shown that he’s learned anything from his failures.
I admit to a bias against Obama, but again, I’m not just finding things to dislike about him. Several government agencies have fallen down on the job under his watch and in every case his response has been that he didn’t know. If the litany of news stories about these failures stops here, then maybe I’ll reevaluate. But if I was a betting man, I’d bet on several more of these types of stories over the next two years, especially since most of these percolate up from the right-wing media months before the MSM notices. The President has more access to his own administration than World Net Daily and National Review do. If they are finding problems, you’d think he’d be interested in dealing with them before they become a “thing”. In the case of the VA, he was warned a couple of years ago and failed to act. With the IRS, there were complaints more than a year before and his lack of interest was palpable. Then Lois Lerner publicizes what they did and he gets in high moral dudgeon, as if he’s just as outraged as the rest of us. This pattern of behavior has to change.
The various mini-scandals are part of his mismanagement of politics. You can’t very well call for government to do more when government makes headlines screwing things up and the President goes, “Wha? I had no idea.”
So what I do when looking at Presidential candidates is I look for people who have impressed me governing a state, or a large city, or a department of the federal government(seriously, why so few cabinet officers running these days?), or a large company, or military experience. Howard Dean by all accounts was a fine governor. So was Bill Richardson, plus he ran the Dept. of Energy and was UN representative. Schweitzer’s a stud. Ditto for Mark Warner, although it doesn’t look like he’s interested. O’Malley’s impressive too, actually giving a damn about how well state government functions and using measurable metrics to find out, and making those metrics public. Jim Webb is intriguing too for his success as a military officer and cabinet official. And I’d give Joe Biden a flyer too, since he’s been VP for eight years and is honest to a fault, something else we’ve been lacking for awhile.
On the GOP side, you’ve got some pretty impressive governors there too. Jindal went a long war towards reforming Louisiana’s corrupt political culture. Scott Walker has done a great job with education and the budget. Mike Pence has continued the good policies of the very impressive Mitch Daniels administration. Paul Ryan doesn’t have much leadership experience but is an impressive budget wonk. Not sure if it’s enough, but I’ll give him a hearing.