You’re finding nitpicks and blowing them up, or finding a few genuine mistakes and minor failures and elevating them.
I don’t think this has much to do with reality. It might fit the narrative of various talking heads, but this isn’t really how government works. The VA has been broken for decades, and despite some major fuckups, has improved in some areas. The IRS thing is a non-scandal (like Benghazi, and many of the other supposed “scandals”). Pretty much nothing happened. He’s far from perfect, but if these are his worst “sins”, then he’s our best President in half a century or more (I don’t believe this is so, by the way). What he’s actually had control of – foreign policy, military, executive actions, etc., has been smooth, for the most part.
I look at issues. Who is going to get us into wars and cause thousands of Americans to die? Who isn’t? Who wants to gut the social safety net? Whose economic policy consists solely of “tax cuts”?0 Who wants to raise the minimum wage to a reasonable level? Who will appoint Supreme Court justices that aren’t nutjobs, idiots, or reactionaries? Who actually believes in science?
You can decide that the President is doing a fine job managing the government, but by choosing a President primarily based on issues say that you really don’t care anyway whether a President is up to the job or not.
I care about issues, but I also care about character and competence. We can afford a certain amount of idiocy and corruption in a Congress with 535 members. We can’t afford that in a branch where all the power of that branch resides in one person. Of course, liberals seem to have solved that problem partially by absolving that one man of any responsibility whatsoever for what goes on in the executive branch. So we actually have a fourth, unelected branch that holds all the real power and has no accountability. Great “innovation”.
Issues (or some issues) are competence (in my view). If someone thinks we should go to war with Iran, they are incompetent. If someone thinks tax cuts that favor the rich are the best way to help the economy, then they’re incompetent. Some issues might not give an indication on competence, but I place far more emphasis on the ones that do.
There’s no point in bringing up this Halperinesque-punditry-foolishness with me – it’s just nonsense, in my opinion. It makes no sense to me. It’s a cartoon view of the President, and of liberals.
Issues aren’t completely unrelated to competence, but especially for liberals, if you want new programs, you need someone who can implement them successfully. The ACA rollout validated every conservative critique of government, and the President was well aware before the ACA rollout that contracting procedures needed reform. He was elected in large part on a government reform message, and he hasn’t done anything to reform the government. O’Malley’s use of metrics to measure how government is performing and making those metrics public, good or bad, is an example of real reform.
That depends on what you wanted out of the law. We obviously have a few million happy customers who are getting insurance for the first time. How do the other 290 million feel about it? They are the ones paying for it.
How so? Many of the 290 million were on Medicare, enjoying government-subsidized insurance. How do they get to wag their fingers at the newly insured as being leeches? Many of the newly-insured are paying full freight for their insurance. Many couldn’t buy before because of pre-existing conditions. Many are now free to pursue other careers instead of being chained to their old job because of insurance.
I know. Much like the President’s competence, the law is a net plus for Democrats, as proven by the fact that Democrats control so many states and Congress and the White House.
This changes things a ton on the GOP side. With Jeb’s name recognition and donor base, there’s only likely to be one “anti-Bush” likely to emerge from the field, and it will have to be a Tea Partier. Chris Christie might as well just not even bother now. Jeb’s going to own the GOP non-Tea Party vote.
To be perfectly accurate, he’s just saying he’s going to “actively explore” the possibility. Maybe just to get his name in the news twice. What’s up with this exploration crap anyway? (and to be fair, Dems do it too) They form “exploratory committees”. What do they do? Sit around and say “yowsuh, we think you oughtta run!”. Or are they like Lewis and Clark and set off on foot to gauge the public interest?
I don’t buy Jeb in a cake walk. His father was a one-termer and his brother was a disaster. There is a whole lot of negativity attached to the name. The fundraising advantage will scare some of the other candidates, but that still isn’t a guarantee.
I wouldn’t count him out. The establishment wing of the GOP wants to get behind somebody and do it quickly so that they can easily pick off the Tea side one by one like Romney did last time. I can’t see Bush as less likely to win than Rubio or Christie. Things could get interesting if the establishment side has 3 guys running and the Tea side settles on Cruz or Paul early.
All of this is moot, Hillary would mop the floor with any of them, barring scandal or health issues.
Jeb might have all the money in the world backing him up, but I can’t see him having a serious chance at the GOP nomination. His stands on immigration and Common Core make him anathema with most of the base right from the get-go.
The GOP has moved rapidly to the right during the Obama years. Jeb last ran for office in 2002. The rust is thick on him, and he’s lost touch with today’s GOP.
By comparison, when Nixon ran for President in 1968, it had only been six years since he ran for CA governor, and he’d been a very active campaign surrogate for Goldwater in 1964.
The big loser in all this is Rubio. His donor base is basically a subset of Jeb’s donor base, and as long as Jeb’s even talking about running, let alone committing to it, Rubio’s not going to have much money coming in, which means he has to wait to get started on his campaign. I didn’t give him much of a chance to begin with, after the way he was basically forced to renounce his own immigration bill, but this pretty much seals the deal, IMHO.