That’s absolutely correct. He won because he knew how to fight for what he wanted. He won because he was willing to twist arms and take names.
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Was I in an alternate universe during the 2008 campaign, when Obama told us over and over he was going to govern pretty much exactly as he has? And all those promises people are claiming he’s not kept faith with, was I the only one paying attention to the things he’s been prevented from doing by his own party?
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Nope…I was there too. He’s pretty much done exactly what I heard him say he’d do, withing a margin of error dictated by political reality. I’m pretty happy with the man, to be honest…which probably goes a long way to explaining why 'doper lefty types (I mean the HARD left 'dopers) and lefties in general are so unhappy with him. The left wing seems to be populated by people who have an unrealistic view of what anyone actually elected to the President COULD do…and they seem to be willing, even eager to sacrifice any Democratic President who doesn’t meet their unrealistic expectations by saying that really Democrats are the exact same as Republicans. 
They did the same thing to Clinton…and while he did manage to get re-elected, his successor, Gore didn’t because all the lefty types wanted to vote for someone like Nadir who had such a good chance of winning!
They are going to fuck around and cost Obama a re-election chance…and that means that we’ll get another god damned Republican President. I’m sure s/he’ll be JUST like Obama, too. :dubious:
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Johnson was a great legislator. He knew how to twist arms and get things done. Obama has accomplished a lot with his history.
How’d that whole Vietnam thingy work out for him?
(You might also want to check on the numbers of Democrats vs Republicans at the time Johnson was Prez as well, chief…though I agree, he was able to get his civil rights agenda pushed through, and kudos to the man for doing it and getting it through in the environment he was working in at the time)
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Obama is our first true (scotsman) conservative president since Eisenhower.
I remember how every day I got more and more pissed off at myself for voting for Bush in 2000. Well, every day I feel better and better about voting for Obama.
Wait, he either got the civil rights, etc. passed because he had so many Democrats and it took no skill, or kudos are due to him for his skill at getting civil rights passed due to the environment at the time.
Which one is it?
You win. I think we can now shut down all Obama threads - there’s nothing more that needs to be said. 
Ah, the limits of Presidential power which oddly enough only exist when a Democrat is in office or such “hard left” issues as opposition to torture come up.
When some Republican President wants to run roughshod over opposition, indulge in lies and wars of conquest and torture and so on, suddenly the President is an unstoppable juggernaut.
It was a completely different environment than today. the south was dominated by Democrats, but the violently opposed civil rights…while northern Republicans supported it. Johnson was President at a time and had a situation the later Dems could only dream wistfully about.
And, lest we forget, while some of his programs were exactly a lefties wet dream, much of it was a good red blooded lefties nightmare…such as that Vietnam thingy I asked gonzo about.
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Starting a war is easy, especially when the American people are scared and angry and want to smash things, like they were after 9/11. But remember, G.W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, and he couldn’t, despite having a Republican Congress. He wanted to reform immigration, and he couldn’t. He tried to get a faith based initiative through Congress, but he couldn’t. Bush wasn’t an “unstoppable juggernaut”. He was only moderately successful in getting his legislative program put through. And I think if you look at Clinton, Bush the Elder, and Reagan, you’ll find much the same thing. They can get some things done, but they’re never going to be able to get everything done they strive for, and they’re always going to disappoint.
See, but what you always fail to grasp is that even under Bush II most of the really sacred cow type right winger desires were twarted. They didn’t get abortion outlawed. They didn’t get prayer in schools. They didn’t get their burning of the flag death penalties put in. They didn’t get all those evil social programs revoked, or the power of the Fed diminished and shrunk while the powers of the individual states were put back. Christianity was not made the state religion…and on and on. To YOU it seemed like a right wing take over, ironically much as right wingers think Obama is the font of all that nasty left wing unholiness, but as with you the right wing didn’t see it that way.
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Plenty of what the Right Wing wanted happened; anything that the Left or even the center has wanted, has happened in spite of Obama not because of him. The two cases aren’t equivalent. Obama hasn’t done much more than work to shield the Republicans and the rest of the Right from the consequences of their actions. He’s a right wing toady and bigot, a collaborator in torture and conquest.
To me, it’s the exact same level of unrealistic whinnage. But ok…in you opinion what did real right wingers get that they really wanted, undiluted by political realities?
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LBJ got the Civil Rights Act passed with only 6 Republican senators voting against it.
Today, if Obama got any bill passed with only six Republican votes against it, critics like you would say he compromised too much and should have demanded a bill that got more Republican opposition.
The conquest of Iraq. Cutbacks to civil rights, more power to the Presidency, dead Muslims, the massacre, rape and torture of foreigners, slashed regulations, a huge recession they could use to demand government cutbacks and enforce “labor discipline”, record breaking oil profits, the opportunity to reshape Iraq, a massive increase the the national debt, a national disaster in the form of Katrina they could blame on Democrats and the government, dead black people in Katrina, reimposing the anti-abortion Mexico City Policy, government money going to religious organizations, further sabotage to public education, the harassment and surveillance of such leftist “threats” as the ACLU and the Quakers, deeply insinuating their partisans into the bureaucracy, etc.
Much of which they are still getting under Obama. For a Democrat, he makes a great Republican.
The irony…you can cut it with a knife. Ah well. That’s what I get for getting into another no-win discussion with one of the faithful. You’d think that, after the various nuclear power threads I would have gotten my fill by now.
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Again, the party system was completely different in those days. All the conservative southern segregationists that today are part of the Republican party were Democrats. Southern Republicans were non-existant, they still hated the Republicans as the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction. Imagine all the vitriol today’s conservative southerners have towards the Democrats, well, back then they felt exactly the same way except it was against Republicans.
I never thought Obama was anything but a moderate conservative. He’s actually right of Reagan in some ways. The problem is that the alternative is lunatic fringe conservatives.
The “right/left” dynamic was reversed then.
No, you can’t. The Left has gotten almost nothing that it has wanted, and what little they did get was against Obama’s obvious will. The Right has relentlessly gotten favors ladled out to it by Republican and Democrat alike.