I’m also thinking Obama is trying to pick people who have already had their backgrounds dug through. He doesn’t want the first couple of months of his administration to be about attorney general nominees and their nanny or a Sec. of Defense who is a drunk.
People who’ve worked in private industry?
AKA people who are unqualified.
For some people nothing he does will be right.
For others nothing he does will be wrong.
So, should Obama take people from the banking industry to fix the mess in the banking industry?
I was thinking of threads like this one. But I don’t know anything about the OP. I could be getting whooshed. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Lots of good responses. If a passing Mod wants to close this, I have no objection.
Although I’ll agree with you so far as this current Bush administration is concerned, it seems that you’re passing off your opinion as fact.
Well the fact that the op was a drive-by post that had no one arguing in its positive in the thread at all and that the thread mainly devolved into a debate about the poster’s motivations may have been a hint.
I think he meant what he said - that he had little or no track record on which to judge his career at the time he wrote the book, and that therefore people had a tendency to assume that he will do whatever they want.
As was pointed out repeatedly during the campaign, he has no executive experience, no managerial experience since college - very little national experience at all. His fifth year of national experience is going to be in the Oval Office.
I think it was George Will who said that the US was the only country that considered the Presidency to be an entry-level position.
But, willy-nilly, once Obama is in the White House, he is going to have to start making the hard choices. As Harry Truman pointed out, that’s where the buck stops.
Obama said lately that he wants to go thru the federal budget line by line, and cut out “waste”, and as an example he talked about millionaire farmers getting subsidies to which they aren’t entitled. Great idea - except[ul][li]The most he can expect to save is $49 million, which is, what four one-thousandths of one percent of the federal budget deficit, and [*]the chairman of the House Agricultural committee, a Democrat, says that while he is against “abuses”, he isn’t going to go along with any significant cuts to farm subsidies.[/ul]So even when a member of his own party runs the committee, Obama cannot expect to make any significant cuts in the program unopposed. [/li]
Obama claims he is going to cut $15 billion from Medicare. Suppose he can bring it off. That would be nice, but compared with the $8.5 trillion spent this year alone on economic initiatives, it is not only less than peanuts, it is less than the fucking shell of a peanut.
How much waste do you have to find to offset spending that is the equivalent of half our total GDP?
These are questions Obama has never had to confront before, and has no background in dealing with. And they will be there on Day 1 of his administration.
The electorate looked at the inkblot, and saw “change” and all that. Some of us looked at the same blot, and saw a naive, big-spending liberal. Maybe he is so quick on the uptake that he can learn all that he needs to know in the first few months. Or perhaps the people he is assembling for his cabinet, who were prominent while the crisis was brewing, will be able to educate him on fixing what they were not able to prevent.
Or, perhaps not, and we are fucked like we haven’t been fucked since the seventies. Time will tell.
Regards,
Shodan
Same for you, so why do you know so much?
Time will tell, but will you be listening? If we enter a period of prosperity that surpasses even that enjoyed during the Clinton administration, will you give him props for that, or will you insist it was all due to Bush’s policies, but stick Obama with any negatives?
I’m certainly not qualified to be President. I’m probably not even qualified to be the President’s chambermaid. But you know what? I cook, and I know that when a peanut breaks in half the short way instead of on its seam and the nut is stuck in there, you just have to break it out bit by bit. There’s no good way to get the shell off all at once, you just have to pick at it, remove a little bit here and a little bit there and it seems like it’ll never be done and then suddenly poof! A peanut.
I’ve also balanced a household budget, and it’s a lot like that. We don’t make enough or spend enough to make dramatic changes, but a store brand of tuna here and a 100 minute fewer a month cell phone plan there and suddenly you’ve got a surplus.
I can’t imagine what he’s facing is different in essence, only in scale.
I pay attention. How about you?
I think this is a big, big part of Obama’s problem. No, it is not like that. At all. If Obama thinks it is, he is in for the rudest imaginable awakening.
Heck, if he can do that, I will vote to re-elect him. More than that, I can’t do.
And, to ask the obvious counter-question, suppose Obama breaks all his campaign promises and the economy is still in the shitter in 2012. Is that going to be any of his fault? Or will you insist it was all due to Bush’s policies, but stick Obama with any positives?
Regards,
Shodan
That all depends on the details.
Okay, wait a minute. You claim that Obama doesn’t know enough or have enough experience to deal with these problems. That implies two things: (1) that you know Obama very well, including details of his knowledge and life experience, and more importantly (2) that you have a sufficient knowledge and understanding yourself of these problems that you can know how much is necessary to comprehend and deal with them.
So, when I ask you how you know so much, in other words what it is you know that Obama doesn’t, you respond with, “I pay attention”. Then let me ask you, when you get your briefings each morning from the president’s advisors, is it that you listen more carefully and are more engaged than Obama is when he gets his?
I think it will be quite likely that the recovery will take longer than four years. But we should be off the bottom, if not back where we want to be. We have some way to go before we turn the corner on what Bush is responsible for.
Why on Earth would complete change be a good thing? Do you really think everyone who ever worked in Washington is so incompetent that none of them have a place in our government?
I assume you also believe that you know him well enough, and have a sufficient understanding of the problems, that your opinion is as least as valid as anybody else’s.
I don’t get any briefings from the President’s advisors. How about you?
Regards,
Shodan
My opinion is that he is very smart — way smarter than I am, anyway. I don’t know what he knows or what all the problems are, but the difference between you and me, it seems, is that I trust Obama’s opinions more than I do my own.
Same. So maybe Obama knows more than either of us.