He bungled Iraq (mitigating factor: He did get rid of Saddam, who was horrible)
He bungled Katrina
The patriot act
Spying on citizens
Torture
Obama pluses:
Through Obamacare more people have healthcare (complicating factors: By expanding a dysfunctional system.
He caught Osama Bin Laden (complicating factor: In a process involving handing large sums of money over to corrupt regimes)
He banned waterboarding (complicating factors: Its difficult to know how complete this ban is, given the lack of transparency. Also other forms of torture can have taken place.)
Obama minuses
He continued the bungling of Iraq
He continued the patriot act
Spying on citizens
He is tougher on immigration than Bush
He is tougher regarding the war on marijuana than Bush, even as it is increasingly legalized.
Pretty much all of the minuses for Obama you indicated are programs started by Bush, that Obama is continuing, so they can’t really be counted against him in a Bush comparison.
The exceptions are:
The immigration issue in which he is indeed deporting more immigrants than his predecessor, but at the same time pushing through programs like the dream act which is much more humane than anything considered by Bush.
As for the war on marijuana, I’d like to see a cite that he is being tougher than Bush. The fact that there aren’t Federal agents with axes knocking over every pot shop in Washington and Colorado, indicates that he is to some extent looking the other way. Its not clear what Bush would have done in the face of states actively condoning the breaking of federal drug laws.
The worst that can be said about Obama is that he didn’t meet expectations, and that he hasn’t been able to get Congress to work with him (which is not really his fault.)
Is this a serious question? Bush was worse by far.
Even in the things that Obama continued, for some of them, he’s tried to mitigate that fact by working to repeal it at the same time.
With immigration, deportations have been high but so has his effort to curb it. He’s worked to try and pass the DREAM Act, he’s directed the feds to ignore the children that immigrated illegally. The only thing he hasn’t done is broken the law because unfortunately, we still have it written that a lot of these people who are caught should be deported. I’m sure if he could fix that, he would, so I give him points for that
I don’t really consider drone strikes to be a negative, its much more preferable to invading a country on falsified intelligence just to make your friends rich and get revenge for your daddy. Drones are the best way to fight against terrorist because you don’t need boots on the ground
He got out of Iraq, that’s a big plus. ISIS isn’t something that can be predicted, things like that just happen in a vacuum. If we had never gone in there in the first place, there would have been no issue
As for pot, he directed the Justice Department to focus on violent offenders instead of people caught for possession, and I think recently he and Holder equalized the penalty for crack and cocaine, lowering the severity of crack because it has been historically racist to prosecute crack harder than cocaine
Maybe that was the worst up until about a month ago. It took Obama 6 years to do something truly stupid, which is about 4 years better than Bush, but he finally did it with this Syria escapade. Obama had all the right non-interventionist instincts at the outset, until the two beheadings and the entire punditry as well as senior members of his administration totally lost their shit, fomenting the idea that ISIS is the gravest existential threat the US has ever faced. In response to all this, instead of urging caution and restraint, Obama buckled like a slap bracelet.
I think Bush’s failures will go down in history as far worse, but as a two-time Obama voter who actually took his “don’t do stupid shit” policy seriously, I’m disappointed.
I think your own knee jerk reaction to anything that smacks of US military intervention is getting the better of you on this. Obama et al aren’t taking us to war in some sort of wild cowboy move because of a few beheadings, but because ISIS/ISIL is a real military threat TO THE REGION…a region where we have a vested strategic interest. You know…that oil stuff that we all use? Cutting off our supplies to that (or even potentially threatening access) is about as grave and existential as threats get, not just to the US but pretty much to everyone who isn’t living as a hunter/gatherer in a remote part of the world. He’s doing exactly the right thing in exactly the right way on this one, and it’s sad that people who should be supporting him on this don’t get it.
As for the OP, there is no real contest IMHO. Who’s worse between Bush and Obama? Ah, I’d have to go with Bush on that one. I don’t think Bush is the world president in our history, but he’s certainly in the bottom 10. Obama is, IMHO, a middling president, mostly do to his hands off style, but he’s solidly in the middle of the pack wrt presidents, maybe even a bit better than the middle.
My own (semi-informed) impression is similar to how I view the parties as a whole: it’s a choice between useless incompetent Democrats and actively evil Republicans.
I don’t see it as particularly worse to start it compared to continue it, so therefore it’s listed as a negative for both. Obama had a choice not to sign the patriot act extension just as Bush had a choice not to sign the original patriot act.
You can google Bush Obama marijuana war Obama Bush or something similar there are many people and numbers saying he is harsher.
This probably wasn’t your intention and just a side effect of bullet points, but I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that bombing ISIS is comparable in scope to invading and occupying a country with 100K soldiers for years and years.
For Obama negatives, I would add that he’s been horrible on transparency despite promising otherwise. And most importantly he’s kissed the ass of the banking and financial sectors. I’m always curious if this sort of thing is a realpolitik “whatcha gonna do” situation or if they legit think they’re heroically saving and preserving the system, which is their public stance.
Bush oversaw the expansion of a massive surveillance and security state. I don’t know how much you can specifically blame him though. Like Gore would’ve or could’ve stopped it? Doubtful.
I concur wholeheartedly with this. To me, this was the biggest disappointment with the Obama admin. They had mountains of evidence of wrongdoing that lead up to the financial crisis, but no one was prosecuted, and no one went to jail, and no one was made an example of (poor English). Major fumbling of the ball there inside the red zone.
That said, I am happy to have voted for Obama 2X considering who he was running against both times. Bush was a bottom dweller when it comes to presidents, and McCain/Palin promised more of the same. Any further steps down the path Bush was on would have been an even bigger disaster. Thankfully, some adults were allowed to step in to try and clean up the mess.
This, in my opinion. Having a opposition party that’s outright irrational in its opposition to Obama isn’t helping him, either; while on the other hand Bush was if anything made worse by the Democrats caving into his foolish desires.
Agreed. There is nothing Obama has done that comes even close to Bush starting the Iraq war. Nothing. That was the worst foreign policy decision since the Vietnam War. Obama would have start an 8 year ground war in Syria to measure “up” to Bush.
I agree with all of this. I think Obama will go down in history with a grade of ‘fair’. He wasn’t near the top, nor the bottom. However, I must say that any comparison between Obama and Bush is ridiculous. Obama was stymied at almost every turn, but you can, I suppose, blame him for being ineffective and inexplicably naive, especially as relates to Republicans. Seemingly everyone in the world except Obama knew the Republicans would never work with him. I believe he would have been more successful with his agenda had he realized this from the beginning and not wasted so much time trying to appease a group that had it out for him since day one.
Bush, on the other hand, (and let’s be honest here, handled by Cheney and his cadre of neocons) can be argued to have committed war crimes, as well as allowing financial machinations, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, that precipitated the financial crisis.
As has been said by others, Obama was very naive when he was inaugurated. I think he honestly believed that he’d be given the opportunity to persuade everyone to put the good of the nation ahead of their own political party and agenda. Unfortunately, he’s been stymied and stifled at every step.
I’m surprised nobody has brought up the difference in stance the two have on gay marriage. During his presidency, President GW Bush endorsed a proposed constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. In contrast, President Obama actively endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down part of DOMA, thereby granting the same tax, health, and pension benefits to same-sex couples as afforded to traditional husbands and wives.
I may have just never noticed it before, but I’ve never seen such hatred towards a president before. It seems that no matter what he does, even the smallest, most inoffensive thing, people find a reason to take umbrage. For example, when he stood in front of gold drapes in the East Room while giving a speech, the internet was ablaze with this proof that he was a Muslim terrorist with the audacity to flaunt his prayer curtain. Never mind that drapes in the East Room have been gold ever since JFK was president. Never mind that the current drapes were put up when President GW Bush was in office. Never mind that they depict such Muslim religious symbols as angels, doves, and olive branches.
Oh. please. Obama is a politician like all the rest. His position on SSM “evolved” when it became politically expedient to do so. When he promised to act on immigration by the end of the summer, it suddenly became politically expedient not to do so until after the election.
I don’t think Bush is the world president in our history, but he’s certainly in the bottom 10. Obama is, IMHO, a middling president, mostly do to his hands off style, but he’s solidly in the middle of the pack wrt presidents, maybe even a bit better than the middle.