No, he doesn’t set the price, but he does have certain policies that have an effect.
He’s the one who decided to make war in Libya, and then not really make war in Libya. So instead of stomping Khadafy like a cockroach or letting him finish off these rebels (who are chummy with Al Qaeda, so no great loss), he’s made us a party to the stalemate.
Limiting Gulf Exploration- Not letting a good crisis go to waste.
ANWAR- can we finally all admit we don’t give a flip about scrub grass in the frickin’ tundra?
Now, those are all short term solutions. Long term, we need to wean ourselves off petroleum. But it’s not like he’s got any great ideas for that, either.
I’m kinda curious how much a president, any president, can be help responsible for economic indicators. I get that a lot of Americans want to blame (or credit) a president for bad news or good.
Most of what the president can do is indirect, bully pulpit stuff. But there are a bunch of unfilled government positions in the Federal Reserve and other agencies that Obama could have filled via recess appointments, but didn’t because he’d rather be the Grand Conciliator instead of the President.
They can certainly be held accountable for both failed actions, such as the stimulus package, along with the perception of misdirected priorities. / interest, such as gun control or cap. & trade
I guess gun control was just an arbitrary example there, just one possible thing that a President might hypothetically focus on rather than the economy?
Presidential elections are rare events, rare enough that it’s hard to extrapolate trends from them. Every Presidential election is the first time something happened.
It’s possible to argue that Obama can’t win with the unemployment rate where it is, but four data points spread out over nearly a century just don’t make for compelling evidence.
Sounds like those “kooky college kids” know a good thing when they see it, and that the GOP are hanging with the Empty Suits and Raving Lunatics… again.
I was one of those kooky college kids, too. Almost all of those kooky college kids that spend insane hours making sure it happened in 2008 are chomping at the bit to get back in and do it all over again.
Even if you buy that the recent college grads will turn against Obama, don’t forget that there’s a whole bunch of kooky college kids coming up right behind them.
I take issue with this. My salary has been paid for by the federal government for more than 23 years. Twenty years of that was as an active duty Soldier with the U.S. Army with a tour in both Iraq and another in Afghanistan.
Now that I’ve retired and I have the ability to bill the U.S. government for crazy things like overtime or weekends; I still find that I don’t. Yet I can’t begin to count the number of times some crisis or another has popped up at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday or early on a Sunday morning.
I realize, fully in fact, that there are disgruntled federal, state and local employees and that some of them need to have their pink slips handed to them but please don’t use such a broad brush.
We aren’t all useless and lazy employees sucking down government funds. Some of us are very enthusiastic, passionate even, about our profession.
Well, thankfully, the grownups will realize what a horrible mistake that was, and fix it.
Seriously, it’ll be funny to watch these kids go up to the door of some guy whose been unemployed for the last two years, and tell them we need another four years of this nonsense.
