Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

rogue49 · Apr 28, 2015

I don't know @Aceventura ...but I guess it's better than deciding just because you'd like to have a beer with him.

Give me job quality everyday...but most people's definition and standard changes with their biases.
If they like them...then they don't worry about it.
If they don't, then they better be the best damned president ever and even that isn't good enough.

I don't judge people by one standard, set at one time. (all attributes in one category)
I judge on the situation, the result, the pattern and it may change.
It's more complicated, but it's fair.
Then again humans are complicated...even the ones that make you laugh or have a beer with.

redux · Apr 28, 2015

Aceventura said: ↑

Are you saying it is better to have a President that tells a good joke over a President who can do his job?
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One has nothing to do with the other.

I think a self-deprecating sense of humor is a positive trait in a leader, particularly one who is continually under attack by the opposition. Obama has it, Reagan had it. The Bushs and Clinton, not so much.

rogue49 · Apr 29, 2015

redux said: ↑

The Bushs and Clinton, not so much.
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Actually, Bill Clinton had it...if he was in a good mood. If you pissed him off or he was covering himself, he went on the attack.
Hillary doesn't have it.
She takes herself seriously and doesn't know how to by wry spontaneously. (if she does, it's a planned event or skit)

Obama is a quick wit, even in the worst scenarios...his sarcasm is a good tool in his toolkit.

Soft skills are just as important as hard abilities.
Some have it, some don't.

Aceventura · Apr 29, 2015

redux said: ↑

One has nothing to do with the other.
Click to expand...

President Obama is a good speaker, tells funny jokes, can sing, great smile, has a good jump shot, a loyal husband and a good father - but he is the worst President in the past 100 years. For him one does relate to the other.

Baraka_Guru · Apr 29, 2015

Aceventura said: ↑

[President Obama] is the worst President in the past 100 years.
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Wait, don't tell me: He destroyed the economy and hugged all the terrorists.

Street Pattern · Apr 29, 2015

Aceventura said: ↑

he is the worst President in the past 100 years.
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Aha, I see the period of time has been shortened up from "worst president ever", to avoid making the ridiculously untenable claim that Obama is somehow "worse" than Fillmore or Buchanan or Pierce.

But that still argues for Taft, Harding, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush and Bush (among others) as ALL having been "better" presidents than the current incumbent. Even without any historical perspective yet, it's hard to take that seriously.

Baraka_Guru · Apr 29, 2015

Street Pattern said: ↑

Aha, I see the period of time has been shortened up from "worst president ever", to avoid making the ridiculously untenable claim that Obama is somehow "worse" than Fillmore or Buchanan or Pierce.

But that still argues for Taft, Harding, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush and Bush (among others) as ALL having been "better" presidents than the current incumbent. Even without any historical perspective yet, it's hard to take that seriously.
Click to expand...

Honestly though: He's the worst liberal North American head of government since the '90s. Where the fuck is the surplus? He's going to blow the streak.

Aceventura · May 8, 2015

Street Pattern said: ↑

Aha, I see the period of time has been shortened up from "worst president ever", to avoid making the ridiculously untenable claim that Obama is somehow "worse" than Fillmore or Buchanan or Pierce.
Click to expand...

I can admit when I am wrong. After further consideration of the question I think it is more accurate to state that Obama is the worst President in the past 100 years.

But that still argues for Taft, Harding, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush and Bush (among others) as ALL having been "better" presidents than the current incumbent. Even without any historical perspective yet, it's hard to take that seriously.
Click to expand...

I think Obama and Carter are pretty close - I would take the others. For Obama, I believe he is potentially doing irreversible harm - not only from a US perspective but from a global perspective. I think he has moved us closer to global nuclear war more so than any other President, which is a weighty factor in my assessment. For example - Ford is a President who basically did no harm, it is not about accomplishment - if Ford is 0, Obama runs in the negative.
--- merged: May 1, 2015 at 11:59 AM ---

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Wait, don't tell me: He destroyed the economy and hugged all the terrorists.
Click to expand...

My thoughts run a bit bigger than that. When I am ready to publish my analysis, I won't do it here.

Baraka_Guru · May 1, 2015

Aceventura said: ↑

My thoughts run a bit bigger than that. When I am ready to publish my analysis, I won't do it here.
Click to expand...

That sounds ominous. Do you think Obama is/will be the catalyst for WWIII?

I wonder how things would have been different if he worked better with Congress.

Aceventura · May 1, 2015

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

That sounds ominous. Do you think Obama is/will be the catalyst for WWIII?
Click to expand...

I think we are on that path. As I wrote, I believe he is potentially doing irreversible harm, I have not concluded that he has in fact done irreversible harm. Basically restating what I wrote.

I wonder how things would have been different if he worked better with Congress.
Click to expand...

All leaders have opposition. Obama uses opposition as an excuse.

Derwood · May 2, 2015

If only he had listened to Congress....you know, the ones who are openly working with America'a enemies in order to make Obama look bad

Baraka_Guru · May 3, 2015

Aceventura said: ↑

I think we are on that path. As I wrote, I believe he is potentially doing irreversible harm, I have not concluded that he has in fact done irreversible harm. Basically restating what I wrote.
Click to expand...

I think he should discontinue the drone program too. It's a disgrace, and I'm surprised that so few seem concerned about this.

All leaders have opposition. Obama uses opposition as an excuse.
Click to expand...

I think that's really the only way he can use this opposition.

ASU2003 · May 10, 2015

President Obama's Milestone: The Commander-in-Chief Visits All 50 States - ABC News

Obama managed to visit all 50 states as President. I think it is a good goal for any President or Vice President to actually go to the places in this country that are doing well and those places that aren't doing so well. The country is very similar in some ways, but there are also big differences that policies have to reflect between different areas in this country. I think that is what the current group of politicians and candidates are failing to talk about. They talk to the people concerned about the issue they care about, but don't try and explain it to those people in other areas why they should also help and support the issue.

As for me, I've been to 30. 29 on purpose. My Dad took a wrong turn and we ended up in New Jersey once. I have only been to the airport in Colorado and North Carolina as well so those might not officially count.

http://www.visitedstatesmap.com/image/ALAZCACOFLGAILINKSKYMDMIMNMOMTNVNJNMNYNCOHOKORPATNTXUTVAWAWV009900xlg.jpg

OtherSyde · May 25, 2015

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

I think he should discontinue the drone program too. It's a disgrace, and I'm surprised that so few seem concerned about this.
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Why..? I mean air drones and other unmanned vehicles are the inevitable next step in warfare for every developed nation; why risk lives when you could just send a disposable remote-controlled piece of hardware? If it gets shot down, no one dies. I don't think they should be giving out medals for drone "pilots" (and I use "pilots" very lightly here), and it does make it awfully easy to kill a lot of people without much risk or accountability, but it's an unavoidable coming reality of war.

rogue49 · Jun 28, 2015

Ok, whether you agree with his policies or not...you have to agree that Obama may be feeling this is his best week EVAR!!
Why This Might Be the Most Consequential Week of Obama's Presidency

Now, I don't know about most "consequential" but he IS on a roll

a win for Obamacare

a win for gay rights

a win for fast tracking trade (AND with the GOP vs the Dems)

a great speech (and song) for victims of racism

etc and so on...

Now you note, I sais "a", not "the"...because there will be more battles...back and forth, nothing is ever straight forward or finished in DC.
But you've got to admire the man's luck and talent with these.

Almost as if we're finally seeing the Obama who's figured out how to market and push.
If he keeps this up, God knows what he can do in his last year and a half. (certainly, no lame duck here)

I wonder if this satisfies those who always claim they want Obama to "lead"???
Is this Leading enough?

No matter what...Shit, that scene with Amazing Grace will go down in history.
They'll play that clip like crazy and forever.
Reagan's "tear down this wall", JFK's "Ich bin en Berliner". FDR's "Nothing to fear but fear itself"

He may have just gone legendary...doesn't matter if we like him or not.

rogue49 · Jun 29, 2015

Ok, I'll say out & out...this would be a good job.
President Obama overtime rule change - The threshold to qualify for overtime pay

I'm all for capitalism...and I know what it's like to pay for employee services
....and be a professional or manager (and why you may want to be exempt, ideas cannot be quantified by onsite time)
However, companies take WAY too much advantage of this.

Right now, they're getting the equivalent of partial slave labor.
This is why I like getting paid hourly. (if I work, you pay me)
A service for a price.

This is only fair, I don't care if this isn't "fair" for business...or it hurts the bottom line.
BIZ profits...they don't share...that's fine.
But if a BIZ wants to be in BIZ...then you gotta fuckin' pay your people.
If not, get out of the BIZ...you cheap shits.

This is not Egypt, you're not Pharaoh.
Pay up.
Your staff is working their asses off for you.

OtherSyde · Jul 14, 2015

Fuck yeah @rogue49 !! Fucking bunch of cheap-ass swindling Donald Trump motherfuckers lol

rogue49 · Jul 28, 2015

OK, this article is noting what I've always said...Obama is a long-game player.

Barack Obama’s Long Game
A month of victories has transformed the president’s second term. - By TODD S. PURDUM, July 16, 2015

Barack Obama is not a modest man, but when it comes to assessing his or any president’s place in the long American story, he has been heard to say, “We just try to get our paragraph right.”

Yet the way a raft of recent events have broken sharply in his favor, Obama suddenly seems well on his way to writing a whole page—or at least a big, fat passage—in the history books.

From the Supreme Court decisions upholding his signature health care plan and the right of gay Americans to marry, to contested passage of fast track trade authority, the opening of normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and an international agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Obama is on a policy and political roll that would have seem unimaginable to many in Washington only a few months ago.

“Obama may be singular as a president, not only because of his striking background,” says Kenneth Adelman, who was Ronald Reagan’s arms control negotiator with the Soviets three decades ago, and who has his doubts about the Iran deal. “It may turn out that unlike virtually any other president, his second term is actually better than his first.”

Rallying his cabinet in January in the wake of the Democratic Party’s decisive defeat in last fall’s midterm elections, Obama himself maintained, “Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.” This president has always been something of a clutch player, but his command of recent events—from his soaring eulogy for the victims of the Charleston church massacre, to his commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminal offenders than any president since Franklin Roosevelt—goes a good way toward proving the prescience of his words.

For much of the last five years, it had seemed Obama’s peculiar misfortune that the biggest achievement of his time in office—the adoption of his health care plan—might also prove his biggest defeat, because of the bitter and unyielding political and legal backlash unleashed by its narrow passage on a strict partisan vote.

Simultaneously, Obama’s ability to take decisive unilateral action on foreign policy—often a source of succor and satisfaction to second-term presidents—seemed highly limited, if only because he remained saddled with the ugly aftermath of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the ISIL threat.

Not so long ago, much of the chattering class was reading the last rites over the Obama administration, and turning to the 2016 election as a test of whether anything would be left of the president’s legacy if a Republican succeeded him. That’s still an open question, of course. But the Court’s recent rulings and Obama’s own seemingly unplugged and swing-for-the-fences attitude on questions from race to criminal justice has given his presidency a sharply re-invigorated viability and relevance.

“It’s an unfinished chapter,” says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who is writing a new biography of Gerald Ford. “But he has already defied the second-term curse and the wisdom of just six months ago. ‘What can a president do if he doesn’t have either house of Congress?’ Well, guess what, he can reverse a 50, 60-year-old policy toward Cuba. But, more than that, he can still, even without the traditional televised Oval Office version of the bully pulpit, to a large degree set the terms of the national debate.”

The president’s very demeanor in his White House news conference on Thursday bespoke a renewed intensity and determination to make the most of the time he has left. Much of the time, he fielded questions in a relaxed posture, leaning on the lectern with one elbow, but some of his answers were emphatic bordering on brusque. As the session wound down, he canvassed the East Room for more questions about the Iran agreement with a kind of “Hit-me-with-your-best-shot” bravado, as if to show how important he believes it to be. With a blithe air that belied the seriousness of the issue, he quoted that noted diplomat Ricky Ricardo to say that if Iran mined more uranium than it was supposed to, “They got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

“It is a measure of the times in which we live that we start the legacy discussion a year and a half before the end of a presidency,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s former longtime strategist. “But he’s had the most productive period he’s enjoyed since the first two years: Cuba, the climate agreement with China, action on immigration, fast track on trade, the SCOTUS decisions on health care and marriage and now this agreement on Iran. These are big, historically significant developments, in most cases the culmination of years of commitment on his part.”

Obama himself said he hoped Congress would debate the Iran agreement on the facts and the merits, but added, “We live in Washington and politics do intrude.” The sharp and instantaneous denunciation of the president’s comments by Republicans was a sure sign of the parallel universes that constitute American politics these days. Former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that Obama was a “very, very naïve man,” who “cannot put the dots together,” while Glenn Beck’s daily email newsletter subject line was, “Obama continues to destroy the country.”

The Republicans are not the only obstacle that Obama faces. He won his fast track Asian trade authority with largely Republican support, and the Iran agreement has stirred significant Democratic skepticism, among even the party’s leaders in Congress. If the Greek financial crisis engulfs Europe and spreads to Wall Street, there is no telling what the American economy might look like when Obama leaves office in 18 months.

By definition, the success or failure of the Iran agreement will not be known until long after Obama has left office, and critics like Adelman worry that even if Iran cheats on its obligations, international sanctions will never be re-imposed, because violations will be so hard to prove and the global investment in Iran will be so entrenched that it cannot be unwound.

But time and again, Obama has proven himself patient and willing to play what he likes to call the long game, or what Axelrod summed up as “the determination to resist small, incremental politics to do big, transformational things.”

The president’s former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, notes that almost all of Obama’s recent successes had their origins in things he said and did long ago, including his insistence in a 2007 primary debate that it was worth talking even to enemies (an assertion that many commentators saw as a gaffe at the time) and his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race (which he made over the nervous objections of some of his advisers).

“This is the long game paying off,” Favreau says. “Most critically, he understood that change on all of these issues would come at a slower and more gradual pace than the perpetual hysterics in Washington would demand. When it came time to actually govern, he put the history books ahead of the news cycles, and our politics will be better off if future presidents follow his example—because the thousands of words written since the midterms about how resigned and defeated Obama is now seem as insightful as the comments section of a blog.”

For all the travails that second terms bring—and for the inevitable fatigue the public tends to have for any president after eight years—there are also achievements that come with the experienced gained in office. Ronald Reagan’s second term was nearly undone by the Iran-Contra scandal, but then burnished by his role in helping to end the Cold War. Bill Clinton was brought low by impeachment, but he also helped broker peace in Northern Ireland and led the calls for NATO bombing to stop Serbian attacks in Bosnia and Kosovo that redeemed his first-term reticence to intervene there.

Obama himself has often suggested—as he did again this week—that he aspired to do more than mark time, and instead intended to conduct a transformative presidency akin to Ronald Reagan’s, which moved the needle of public sentiment in decisive and lasting ways about the proper role of government at home and the capacity for co-existence with the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union abroad.

Historian Smith, while cautioning that no reliable assessment of Obama’s legacy could be made until decades from now, suggested that there was nevertheless “emerging evidence that Obama may be pulling off on the left what Reagan did on the right.”

“That is to say,” Smith says, “certainly, if you look at the cultural politics, there is no doubt America is to the left of where it was when Obama took office.” Smith noted that recent polling had found a sharp narrowing in the gap between the percentage of Americans who consider themselves conservative and those who identify as liberal, together with the reality that Obama has the country’s changing demographics and attitudes on issues like gay marriage on his side.

But he added: “If Obama moves the center of political gravity, as well as the center of cultural gravity—which might have moved without him, let’s face it—but if he can move the center of political gravity several degrees to the left—we’ve been waiting for a post-New Deal liberalism for a long time—Jimmy Carter saw the need for it, Bill Clinton gave us a first draft—then he will be a transformative president, because he will have transformed the political consensus.”

The very intensity with which Obama’s opponents rail against his policies—and what most mainstream commentators hail as his successes—suggests that Smith may be onto something. Republicans themselves have acknowledged, for example, that their dogged efforts to defeat his health care bill, or cripple it from birth, were based on the certainty that once the program’s most popular policies (such as no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions) were in place, it would be effectively impossible to repeal Obamacare.

The effect of outside events on Obama’s remaining time in office is impossible to predict. But there are clues in the president’s own words about the issues he might choose to emphasize, including overhauling the criminal justice system, which he said on Wednesday was “part of the broader set of challenges that we face in creating a more perfect union.”

In the wake not only of the Charleston shootings but other instances of police violence against blacks, Obama has also shown himself notably more willing to talk out loud about the enduring complexities and unfinished business of race in American life. Three years ago, the president touched off considerable controversy—and no little praise—in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, when he declared in the White House Rose Garden, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Today, if anything, he speaks even more freely, as he contemplates what might have been in his own life, and what he might yet do as president. “There but for the grace of God,” he said on Thursday, after becoming the first sitting president to visit a federal penitentiary, in El Reno, Oklahoma—just days after his mass commutation of sentences for non-violent offenders.

If the clock on his time in office is winding down, Obama—a reserve shooting guard on his high school’s state championship basketball team whose playground style never quite meshed with his coach’s by-the-book ethos—seems even more determined to run up the score.

“I think he feels, ‘The clock is ticking, and why don’t I go for things?’” Adelman says. “’I’m never going to really move the Republicans. I’m never going to move the Democrats on issues like free trade.’ And many times that may have moved him to the edge—or even over the edge—of his legal authority. But he’s trying.”
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And he's playing by himself on some things...and letting Congress play on its own things...no interaction...and its working, Congress is actually being productive.
No need to "lead" them, just play his Zen-master shtick and get out of the way on theirs (unless a veto is needed, but he rarely uses that)
Then wax on powerfully and act on his own things.
4th quarter player indeed.
I'd say like Michael Jordan...dominating on his own, but not hogging all the ball and letting the other star players do their own thing.

ASU2003 · Aug 16, 2015

That is the question I hope comes up in the debates. How will you work with Congress to get things done?

I'm impressed that Obama has been able to get so much done without help from the Congress. But, I also wonder what would happen if Sanders or Trump win. Hillary will be met with the same resistance from the Tea Party/Fox News. I'm not sure what the Democrats would do if Jeb, Carson, or Kasich win.

rogue49 · Sep 28, 2015

The Quiet Grand Strategy of Barack Obama

A long, interesting & excellent article on Obama's foreign policy from The American Conservative.

The man plays the long game like a grandmaster...
...and may be a better conservative than most conservatives.

I've said this for some time.
Think about it.

It's almost like he's playing a game like Bismarck

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