Opinions on Barack Obama's presidency - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Polls on politics, news, current affairs and history.

I think that Barack Obama was a (n)..........president.

outstanding.
1
2%
near great.
1
2%
above average.
16
31%
average.
6
12%
below average.
4
8%
poor.
5
10%
very poor.
12
23%
too early to pass judgment.
No votes
0%
I regard US presidents as mere figureheads, they hardly influence policies.
6
12%
other (please elaborate).
1
2%
#14833997
Drlee wrote:Thank you for posting evidence to support my point in its entirety.



Really? You accuse me of not backing up what I said and then I answer a multitude of questions you requested including a BET You challenged me too. You think your answer is winning by ignoring it all. I think you proved to everyone what I originally thought. You showed me the new guy didn't you.
#14834028
Calm down. You will have a stroke. Read what I posted then read what you posted. That's a good man.
#14842210
I was thinking about this recently. Obama's ongoing popularity seems to be a product of several factors, despite his numerous foreign policy disasters.

1) He's a liberal darling. Obama himself represented the best part of liberal America: scholar, lawyer, constitutionalist, demagogue. As a black man born of mixed parents, he certainly represented the legendary "American dream" of the little-man made good.

2) Michelle Obama also represents the best aspects of liberal America, although lacking the horatio algier aspect as she came from a far more privileged background. But once in the White House, Mrs. Obama represented all those things good and sacred in America, a doting mother, urbane, sophisticated, rich, with a significant media presence that I don't think should be under-looked. I always found this event from the Oscars in which Ben Affleck won best picture for Argo particularly striking, and representative of the glamour that Michelle represented.



3) The Obama's carefully constructed public image operated largely as a cover for the numerous questionable policy decisions under the hood, of which I suppose these would be less obvious to people focused solely on the domestic image of the "consoler" or "professor" -in-chief. So for example liberals appeared to be willing to overlook Obama's massive expansion of government spying and undeclared drone wars, something I always found untenable.

4) Compared to Trump, who liberals clearly consider toxic, Obama now looks like a genius, and even a man of the people through his twitter feed and other public statements. This is regardless of the multimillion dollar house he bought in Washington, or the huge figures rendered to him for his memoirs and so on.

So in short, I'd say Obama was the ultimate liberal president, including the hypocrisy that naturally entails.
#14843588
Tailz wrote:I think Obama was a fantastic figurehead as far as public relations. He made America look good.


He didn't make America look good, not at all. The thing is powers to be from the Cultural Marxist side control the media there for they control perception and the perception you have of Obama is a illusion. He went to campaign against Brexit which made Brits want to Brexit even more, he went to South America in his second term and couldn't find his way to Brazil because people hated him with passion because of his policies in the region. His image in the Middle East, including Israel, is of a psychopath crook. Eastern Europe also hated him almost as much as they hate Hilary.

The only ones who think Obama made America look good are MNSBC, CNN, CBS and their minions
#14843592
The only good thing Obama did that I can think of, is finally starting the process for universal healthcare in America. Otherwise he did not live up to the hype of "CHANGE" that he promised. That is why I voted him as a poor president.

American people like so many throughout the world desire change of the way things are. Obama (Democrats) who represent the liberal America and progressive way, were given a chance to change things in America in their own way. They ultimately failed in that task. And honestly, I think there is no going back to that moment now. There will be no other chance for "progressive" and liberal way now. As now a lot of people can see that it is an ideological pipe-dream that the Dems represent, that was bound to fail and there is no point of trying again. Thankfully a lot of people are waking up to reality.

Now it is Trump and Republicans who have the ball in their own court. If they too fail to deliver the desired outcome for the people, then some real shit will hit the fan down the line. As a lot of people would completely give up hope in the system by then.
#14845346
With Obama, what you see is what you get. It was always there in plain view.

The Immortal Goon wrote:They get really blubbery and bitchy when you mention that it was becaue he was black they hated him the most, but there is no substantial other reason given beyond, "He accepted Mitt Romney's view of healthcare!" The love of him from Democrats is about race, the hate of him from Republicans is about race. Otherwise, he's exactly like any other fool capitalist.


Obama's actions in office are essentially that of a mainstream Republican; letting the banks skate, telecom immunity, the Insurance Industry Subsidy Act (aka ACA), etc., foreign coups and wars, etc. The list is actually quite horrendous. Except for not starting a major ground war, Obama is worse than Bush II.

The handful of so-called progressives in Congress aren't that much better. Most of them voted the $.7T defense authorization (Sanders voted no, at least). Republicans despise single-payer and Democrats say it's not time yet - operationally, it makes no difference. Now is not the time to talk about climate change, single payer, etc., whatever offends your donors. We all know it will never be time.

Even Nixon managed to come up with a universal health care plan, overriding the opposition of his own cabinet. His plan would have had business mandates rather than Obama/Romney's individual mandates. Sen. Kennedy shot it down - yes, we could have had UHC 40+ years ago.

The GOP hysteria around Obama is actually kind of funny. It always reminds me of the codger in Blazing Saddles shouting the Sheriff is a n.... "he said Obama is near!"

Obama earns a solid C-. He entered the stage with a nation in economic crisis. It was a moment that demanded bold and forceful action. He instead pulled a Hoover. He only escapes an F by not doing something monumentally stupid to land us in a major war.

MB. wrote:...The Obama's carefully constructed public image operated largely as a cover for the numerous questionable policy decisions under the hood, of which I suppose these would be less obvious to people focused solely on the domestic image of the "consoler" or "professor" -in-chief. So for example liberals appeared to be willing to overlook Obama's massive expansion of government spying and undeclared drone wars, something I always found untenable.


The public image is paper thin. His family background is eerily similar to Bush I: there's deep CIA involvement on both sides of the Obama family, and Obama worked for a CIA front group prior to his political career.
#14845353
The public image is paper thin. His family background is eerily similar to Bush I: there's deep CIA involvement on both sides of the Obama family, and Obama worked for a CIA front group prior to his political career.


This sounds rather conspiracy ish

As for the rest, most american's, and most democrats, aren't socialists, they aren't democratic socialists, they aren't social democrats. A minority of democrats are "progressive" at best which from what I can tell is just a mix of economic populism and social liberalism that doesn't really address the fundamental structure of our economy and just want's healthcare, jobs, and stuff cheaper with no underlying ideology.

There's a certain amount of anger towards people like Obama on the far left that feels a little misdirected. It's not that Obama is a fake people love for image reasons who is actually supports policies they hate, Obama really does represent to a large extent the policy preferences of a lot of Americans. They wan't more military spending, they want careful changes to the healthcare system that doesn't disrupt what they have now, many american's fear wide-scale change, many Americans while not particularly liking banks support the system we have that requires banks to operate.

I'm just generally spewing some thoughts right now but I do think the far lefts hatred of Obama, Clinton, and other democrats is more an expression of anger at the american public for being far more right wing than them than it is a real criticism that they don't represent the people. They do represent the people ultimately.

Perhaps you could say that they have been tricked or brainwashed, but ultimately I would say that 90% of people don't really think about politics in a deep philosophical way, they don't hold consistent views in support of or against capitalism, the military, or a variety of other policies. They are just people who have a few particular things they support like more jobs, more healthcare, more freedom, being able to be a bigot, anti-bigotry, etc. there isn't any underlying cohesion to their views. If there were then I really don't think interest groups would be able to push politicians to grow the military, but because people want jobs and are unhindered by any consistent world view defense companies can build lots of plants everywhere and leverage the jobs they provide to get congressmen to do things.

Ultimately that's why identity politics are such a fundamental part of american politics. Someone has an interest in a set of policies because of the group they are in that those policies effect. You can play to a set of groups by supporting policies and they wont care about whatever else you do since they don't have a consistent feeling about other issues. Republicans play up white and christian identity politics, democrats play to minority identity politics, and that's not a reflection of their cynicism but a reflection of how most Americans think about politics and their interests.

We have, more or less, the politicians we deserve. People fear change, even when the change is ultimately far better than where they are now.

Ultimately I think the 10% or so with deep ideological commitments have to either find a way to work within the system, or organize a revolution and impose their views undemocratically until they become the norm.

p.s. I just wen't on a complete free form tangent so it's not really a comment on any particular poster.
#14845362
Adolf Reed warned us about Barack Obama way back in 1996 -
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.


Just more than a decade after Reed published this prescient assessment, one of the many clues on the coming neoliberal, Wall Street-vetted nature of Obama’s presidency came when he affiliated himself from the start with The Hamilton Project (THP), a key neoliberal Washington, D.C., think tank. THP was founded with Goldman Sachs funding inside the venerable centrist and Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution in spring 2006. Its creator was no less august a ruling class personage than Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs CEO who served as Bill Clinton’s top senior economic policy adviser and treasury secretary. A legendary Democratic Party “kingmaker” who is often half-jokingly called “the wizard behind the curtain” of Democratic economic policy, Rubin was the veritable godfather of late 20th century and early 21st century U.S. neoliberalism. In accord with the “Rubinomics” trilogy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, Clinton joined with corporate Democrats and Republicans to enact the great job-killing and anti-labor North American Free Trade Agreement, slash government spending, eliminate restrictions on interstate banking, repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (which had separated commercial from investment banking), and prevent the regulation of toxic “over-the-counter” financial derivatives (with the so-called Commodity Futures Modernization Act).

Beneath standard boilerplate on the need for “broad-based economic growth” and “an effective role for government in making needed investments,” THP has remained devoted—in the words of left political-economist Jamie Peck—“to fiscal discipline and free trade, to market-oriented approaches, and to strategies for attacking inequality that are detached from new [social-democratic] entitlement commitments.”

U.S. Senator Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at THP’s opening event in April 2006. Beginning with a special nod of thanks to “the wizard” (Rubin, who sat two chairs to his right), Obama praised Rubin and other Clinton administration veterans in the room. He lauded them for having “taken on entrenched interests” to “put us on the pathway to a prosperity we are still enjoying.” Obama called the new body a “breath of fresh air,” a welcome nonpartisan and non-ideological agent of economic “modernization.” He hailed THP for seeking “21st century solutions” and a practical handle on “what actually works” in a national capital plagued by “tired ideologies” of right and left. It was a classic triangulating “Third Way” neoliberal speech. Obama’s carefully clipped words functioned to “preemptively pacify Wall Street before declaring his presidential ambitions,” according to Peck—ambitions Obama had been harboring from the start of his U.S. Senate career and indeed, long before that.

[...]

Part of it had to do with the powerful symbolic hold of Obama’s skin color and a certain bourgeois kind of racial identity politics. Few white liberal-lefties wanted to deal fully and honestly with how little it really means to put few “black faces in high places” (even in the symbolically highest place of all) when material and social conditions are what they are for millions of ordinary Americans in the neoliberal era. The lesson was somewhat available even under Dubya. With Colin Powell as his first secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice as his first national security adviser and his secretary of state, and Alberto Gonzales as his second attorney general, George W. Bush’s cabinet was the most racially diverse on record. Bush’s presidency was also the most reactionary White House since James Buchanan’s.

[...]

But serious progressives need to fearlessly peer beneath the deceptive words and the Obama myth and look at the actual record. The real history of Obama is something we should learn from before we let the coming anti-Trump resistance be coopted into a great big get-out-the-vote campaign for some new great purportedly progressive Democratic hope like, say, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Kristen Gillibrand, Tammy Duckworth, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Murphy or Michelle Obama in 2019-20. It’s a cliché to quote Santayana on how those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them, but the warning applies quite well here. - Paul Street


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