Make the US Politics Thread Great Again

I don’t think he was a spectacular failure at all rather, the outcomes didn’t quite match the rhetoric. Really good politicians find a way. He didn’t find a way nearly as much as he said he would. Not entirely his fault of course but he needs to shoulder some of the blame for the impasses also.

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Not sure.

Don’t forget he was elected twice by sizable majorities. I think the way he went about things had a bigger influence than the colour of his skin.

Probably not. It was almost certainly a big factor in how successful the tactic was!

Arrogant? Unyielding? My fix was, at best, a rejoinder to your sadly accurate observation that the US is more broken and internally, racially, divided post Obama - 8 years with a non white at the head of the country sure riled up a lot good ole boys and gals and it’s probably not a stretch to think that extended to the senate. But of course it was the agenda first and foremost that enraged the other side, no argument.

Every leader and incoming party has ■■■■ to deal with before they can implement passion policy, but a couple of warfronts and a global economic catastrophe were just a few of the stinky presents left in the Lincoln bed for Obama, who probably did an okay job by our nascent century’s standards. Oh, and somebody called his wife an ape.

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FDR did alright. The wealthy even plotted to remove him.

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Absolutely. But the reason why American politics has gone to ■■■■ is legalised corruption, something he did little to stop, even within his own party.

Why do you think that is the reason US politics has “gone to ■■■■”?

Politicians usually serve the people that got them elected, if your politicians rely on corporate ‘donations’ to run TV ads so they can get and keep their jobs, who do you think they will serve?

Middling isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we’re finding out now. Probably not far off though, I think. In the foreign policy realm I now understand the conservative reaction to him as being too naive and trusting, too slow to recognise the likes of Putin for what they are. That was Romney’s criticism in ‘12.

Incredible speaker, but I think Diggers is right. For a variety of reasons that are not all of his own making the deeds didn’t quite match the rhetoric.

That a percentage of those very determined to bring down him down were forced, when looking for material, to resort to a racist lie (Hi, Donald) says a bit about him being fairly steady.

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Commodity Credit Corporation authorised to provide $12 billion to farmers affected by China’s tariff retaliation. So the government funds farmers - and puts them on welfare - which China might otherwise have funded from US free market export sales.
Part of the program is about finding alternative export markets. Won’t be in the short term if most sales by competitors are under long term contracts.
Wait for Trump to bleat about the increased bilateral trade deficit with China.
And wait for the manufacturing industry to demand assistance comparable to that for farmers.
CCC budget is open- ended and does not require Congressional approval for grants, but it is limited to agriculture. It already subsidises agriculture through the domestic food aid system and has elements of State Trading. If it gets into buying up crops as a price assistance measure, it could end up as price-depressing in the longer term. And, depending on the storage life of crops, we may go back to purchased crops being destroyed. Not a good look.

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Conservative ideology: don’t change things as they are allready working

Conservative critique of Obama: He’s a failure becuase he didn’t implement any change.

Hmmmmm…

They really are wired very differently over there.

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That’s got to be sarcastic, surely.

Of course it is

I’m pretty sure the Conservative critique of Obama was that he is a radical Muslim communist who wears tan suits whilst trying to give black people Obama phones.

The progressive (lefty) critique of him was that he hasn’t been the agent of change he claimed he was going to be.

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Wait until his immigration policies start affecting the farmers ability to hire people to work on them. What’s the bet he tries to loan federal prisoners to help out?

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Never, ever think the right is parody. Its always the truth.

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So effectively use the “we can’t afford it” argument, ignoring that the rest of the western world does, and what the Republicans did with tax cuts…

There’s a lot he could have done and didn’t, republican congressional majority or not. And there’s a lot he only has himself to blame for.

Looking back on the Obama presidency, it kinda seems to me like he believed that American politics had been seriously damaged over the course of the Bush years (always worth remembering what a disaster that guy was - I’d argue that he did far more damage than Trump simply because his administration was more organised and not prone to being derailed by random whims and late-night toilet tweets) and that Obama believed he had a responsibility to try to reach across party lines to help heal it. He was pathologically unwilling to be confrontational or to provoke controversy. I don’t think he WANTED to pinch a Republican healthcare plan, i just think it was that he wanted to introduce a healthcare plan that was better than the current mess, and that had a chance of surviving the next Republican president simple because it was a republican plan.

He obviously badly miscalculated that strategy, if that’s indeed what he was thinking. Shades of Rudd’s carbon pollution scheme - the more ‘left’ of the major party tries to promote a compromise policy to address a serious generational issue, in the hope the more ‘right’ party will accept the olive branch and work together for the national good. Instead, the ‘right’ party immediately takes a hugeadditional step to the right and criticises the compromise solution for being maoist communist terrorist treachery, and the ‘left’ party is left twisting in the wind after ■■■■■■■ off a bunch of their own supporters who think they’ve sold out principle in an attempt to make common cause with extremist nutcases.

If Obama wanted to get his supporters out to vote in the midterms he could have:

  • prosecuted the CIA torturers
  • wound back drone strikes on random Iraqi weddings instead of increasing them by a factor of 10
  • laid off on prosecuting torture/NSA spying whistleblowers
  • been less kid-gloves when a bunch of heavily-armed right-wing lunatics took over a govt building and occupied it for over a fricking month.
  • appointed Merrick Garland to the supreme court as a recess appointment once it became clear that the repubs were not taking steps to fill the position

All of these are things he could have done by executive power or through departmental action. None require even a vote in Senate or Congress. They would have ■■■■■■ off his enemies spectacularly, but seriously, how much worse could they have hated him? And as you say, his voters were getting pretty discouraged at his lack of willingness to fight.

But ok, maybe (for whatever reason) he wanted to avoid doing too much that is overtly ‘left’ and risk annoying the ‘swinging voters’ or democrats in southern/rural states. In, that case, the profoundly obvious thing to do was to PROSECUTE SOME DAMN BANKERS OVER THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS! His base would have loved it. The rust belt voters who went to trump would have loved it. And more important, it was the right damn thing to do. Not a single person, in any of the failing banks, any of the dodgy hedge funds or derivative markets, or any of the deliberately blind auditors or accountancy firms was prosecuted over the GFC. HSBC were proven to, and confessed to, knowingly laundering over a billion dollars for drug cartels and nobody even got sacked for it, much less did time. In fact, one of the fines they copped was tax deductable and after various financial/tax shenanigans the govt actually made a loss on it! Millions of regular people lost everything of course, and to Obama’s credit that could have been a lot worse if he hadn’t (belatedly) stepped in. But his stubborn refusal to nail some hides to the wall bewildered me then and it still does now. He didn’t need congressional or Senate appoval, it was all in the hands of his justice dept. and there was no political down-side whatsoever. Who was defending dodgy bankers in 2010? You could have paid off the national debt by selling popcorn to people watching the trials, bit like the banks royal commission here. By far the biggest mistake of Obama’s presidency imho. It takes some serious effort to be so soft on big-money crooks that a inherited-millions spoiled baby like Trump can actually paint you as out of touch with regular wage-earners without everyone falling over laughing.

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