It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.
I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars - then the guy after him tried to overthrow our democracy and instill himself as president after losing an election. So having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing.
I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars
We got into a shooting war in Syria under Obama. We overthrew the Libyan government with US-French joint airstrikes, too. We fostered relations with the fascist Modi regime in India and failed to secure any kind of lasting peace with Iran. We couldn't actually end the embargo of Cuba or even close down Gitmo. Instead we ended up ramping up police powers in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots.
Despite having a supermajority in the Senate, we never managed to get DC or Puerto Rico their statehoods... which is a shame because DC statehood alone could have kept Mitch McConnell out of the Senate majority position and flipped a host of federal judicial appointments including two in the SC. Extra important given that we lost the Voting Rights Act case under Obama's DOJ and a bunch of redistricting fights as well. That gave us a Republican House Majority despite those districts representing less than 45% of the total voting base.
Hell, one of the first things the Obama House, Senate, and Presidency did after a sweeping win in 2008 was.... to strip federal funds from ACORN!
Maybe some of those fuck-ups were what cost him the House, the Senate, the SCOTUS, and then the Presidency in the snowball of failure that lead up to 2016.
having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing
Having an 8 year break of a smooth operator in office definitely blinded us to the decay of the republic that accelerated under his watch. But who did that ultimately benefit?
I guess it benefited our nation's budding crop of fascists.
Sorry for trying? The guy took a legitimate run at peace with Iran, normalizing relationships with Cuba, and closing Gitmo. The GOP found ready allies among Democratic senators to block it all. (Except the Iran deal which they just blew up the second they were in office again.)
The GOP blocked the aid that would have seen us take a Ukraine like stance to moderate rebels in Syria.
The Super majority in the Senate didn't even last a full year. They had it for six months. People think Obama should have shoved the entire progressive agenda through in six months but you forget Manchin and crew were part of that majority.
Finally, he didn't lose shit in 2016. He wasn't running because there's a term limit on presidents. It was Hillary Clinton and she shit the bed on campaigning.
Trying what? When he took office in 2009, he had all the accumulated Unitary Executive authority accrued under Bush plus direct Treasury Ownership of the six largest banks in the country, plus a Senate supermajority and overwhelming House majority, plus the world's most powerful military.
What did he do with all this in his first two years? Bailouts for the richest of the rich and Mitt Romney's solution to insurance industry reform. No mortgage debt relief, despite naked criminal behavior by the banks his US Treasury Department then owned. No student debt relief. No emergency authorization to expand Medicaid and Medicare - something even dumb-dumb Trump happily waved through without Congressional approval by way of the Stafford Act. No immigration reform which he had the votes for but was afraid to pass without Lindsey Graham's blessing. No climate change bill despite the fact that it was John McCain's fucking bill, he just didn't want to pass it without McCain's official endorsement.
He did not try. He was notable for how much he didn't do, particularly relative to Bush before and Trump after, because he was afraid of looking bad on cable news shows. He was entirely fixated on his public image, rather than on the real social impact of the administration he was orchestrating.
The GOP blocked the aid
The GOP didn't block shit. They had no majorities anywhere in government for two full years.
The Super majority in the Senate didn’t even last a full year.
Donald Trump did more with a simple majority than Obama did with 60 votes. And when he lost that majority, he pulled every lever available to the executive branch. Trump was turning out executive orders as fast as his fat little fingers could sign them. Obama couldn't even be bothered to nominate a full slate of federal judges to fill Bush-Era vacancies.
Finally, he didn’t lose shit in 2016. He wasn’t running
He didn't try to campaign for Hillary in big swing midwestern states. Given how he was underwater on approval through most of his last year of office, maybe it wasn't even the worst move. But this was yet another instance in which he just couldn't be bothered to try.
He had the banks and the military? (We already tackled why a decorative supermajority doesn't equal progressive heaven.) So he should have what? Led a palace coup and ruled as a dictator?
And the GOP don't need a majority. Or have you not been paying attention? They can block anything they want with 40 seats.
You're looking at a president and expecting a king.
Strange that the Democrats were never able to do the same under Trump or Bush.
You’re looking at a president and expecting a king.
I'm looking at an Obama and expecting him to exercise all the powers Congress invested in George Bush. I'm looking at a guy who was literally handed direct ownership of the entire financial system at the end of 2008 and choose to appoint a Fed Reserve hack to the Treasury who would hand it all back to the same bad actors that brought about the crash.
I'm expecting a President to behave like a President and not simply an employee of Wall Street.
Carter was a nuclear technician with a 15 year long political career fixated on privatizing the state and national economy. He inherited a peanut farm from his dying father and kept the business afloat precisely because he understood how to obtain cheap lines of credit. Carter wasn't tilling soil in the 50s. He was a spreadsheets guy.
Donald Trump did more with a simple majority than Obama did with 60 votes.
And this is how I know you're talking out your ass. A pigeon playing chess may look like it's doing a lot, but it literally is just shitting on everything while knocking pieces over. Obama inherited a failing economy, turned it around and trump shat all over it. not the move the country needed. fuck that traitor and you for defending him
A pigeon playing chess may look like it’s doing a lot
You can place at least two of the biggest military conflagrations at the feet of that pigeon. Trump destabilized peace talks between Ukraine and Russia back in 2018, leading to border clashes and the eventual invasion in '21. And his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem kicked off a wave of Israeli/Palestinian violence that brought us to October 7th. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Obama inherited a failing economy
That he bequeathed to Trump eight years later. FFS, black wealth dropped 30% under the Obama presidency, primarily thanks to the robo-signing of foreclosures under his administration. He sided with WellsFargo and Bank of America over tens of millions of middle class homeowners and functionally bankrolled their illegal home seizures via TARP.
Trump inherited a growing economy. learn about economic momentum my guy.
... the data show a continuation of trends, not a dramatic shift. It suggests Trump didn’t build something new; rather he inherited a pretty good situation.
Okay? You're referencing a GLOBAL event and attributing it to single person. If we're going down that path, I find it a strange that the stock market went to shit the same month Trump announced he was running for president [0] - Two can play the correlation is causation game. And even though the market eventually returned to something we might consider normal, it "... was still below the annualized returns of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama" [1].
I mean, "best" by what standard? He's a continuation of the Reagan tradition.
I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that’s not available.
FDR got where he was thanks to a large popular movement that his administration ultimately undermined and dismantled. The guy that delivered Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles onto the American system was a compromise at best.
Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we're taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn't sink the ship.
These guys aren't prime movers, they're consequences of much larger and more sweeping social movements. I would love to be in a country that elects a guy like FDR, but I do not believe that magically making FDR president again would result in anything remotely like the policies we got under his original administration.
I agree with that. I was being somewhat flippant talking about a "Lich King president" (I was going for Warhammer 40k if that helps set the picture better)
Without movements we don't get shit. The rich have access by default. Everyone else has to make their access, typically with movements.
Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we're taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn't sink the ship.
If he'd done a great job, the Dems would have maintained their majorities and Hillary would have won the Presidency.
He did a shit job. He sold out to the big banks. He failed to implement democractic reforms and protect civil rights. He undermined public education, health care, and social welfare. He continued to funnel hundred of billions of dollars to military contractors, heightened tensions in Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately gave us the socio-economic conditions that made Trump a viable candidate for the Presidency.
But he talked good. So, for some reason, we overlook all of that.
He wasn't perfect, sure. But I think you're simultaneously giving him too much and too little credit.
Presidents are figureheads. They get blamed for a lot of trailing indicators they have little control over, and are limited by the particular congresses they have to deal with.
Recently, for example, Biden was pretty limited by the fact that any climate legislation has to get voted on by Joe Manchin.
Obama's policies were impacted by what he thought he could pass.
Look at healthcare, for example. Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton's first year in office. Insurance companies, in particular, spent tens of millions on very successful FUD ad campaigns. Unions were against it, because they often negotiate for "cadillac plans". Much like how Trump moved on after 'repeal and replace' failed dramatically, Clinton did as well.
Obamacare had the advantage that it wasn't an existential threat to the insurance industry. Obamacare was deliberately something Obama thought he could successfully pass, while still being an incremental improvement. And, of course, it did actually pass.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton's failure? Honestly, it's impossible to know for sure.
Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office.
The Clintons weren't advancing universal health care in '93. They advocated a network of regional private plans that would compete for membership under a single regulatory framework. They flatly rejected universal Medicaid expansion. Far from threatening private industry, it was designed as a means of guaranteeing poorer regional networks could thrive with state support (much in the same way Medicare Plan C and the privatized Veterans Care and the privatization of the USPS ultimately are just kick backs to local business owners).
One of the better aspects of the Obama plan was to simply up the qualified enrollment numbers of Medicaid. This was the only part of ACA that really worked. And it was only shoe-horned in to contain costs, as subsidized memberships in private plans had enormous administrative overhead that was normally covered by employers.
But, again, efforts to simply open up Medicaid enrollment to the general population was killed from within the Democratic Party. Even as written, the bill allowed individual states to block Medicaid expansion piecemeal. The private insurance industry had to be protected, both under Hillary's plan and under Obama's.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure?
If Obama and Clinton had supported Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for CT Senate, back when he won the primary in 2006, their odds certainly would have been better. But Obama and Clinton and their good friend Joe Lieberman had no intention of passing Medicare for All, because they were all - quite literally - heavily invested in the well being of the insurance industry.
Hillary wasn't likable. The DNC is to blame for pushing an unlikable, unpopular candidate. They'd rather lose with Hillary, than win with Bernie, so that's what they did. That is not new behavior for them. Plus trump resonated with a lot of fed up idiots, so he got votes. Thankfully he didn't get enough votes the second time around.
She had an enormous base of support and a rabid following for decades. She's at least as likeable as Donald Trump.
The DNC is to blame for pushing an unlikable, unpopular candidate
The DNC does what the donors tell them. And Hillary commanded one of the most successful donor-bundling operations in the party's history. In no small part because so many people liked her.
They’d rather lose with Hillary, than win with Bernie
That's true. But Bernie also had a huge hurdle of likeability to overcome. He had at least as many dings on his score card, being an East Coast Jewish Man who once said nice things about Fidel Castro. Dude was DOA in Florida on that resume alone.
Where Hillary fucked up (and where Bernie had a lot of potential) was in the Midwest. And all that is thanks to NAFTA. The Democratic Party is still wrestling with the ghost of 1993 and Bill's decision to move ahead with NAFTA after campaigning against it. Obama fucked Hillary horribly when he pushed ahead with the TPP, which dredged up all those skeletons and gave everyone in the Midwest flash-backs to the de-industrialization of the prior decade.
Trump was able to campaign on "America First" against a Democratic Party that is far too in-bed with international business interests to say anything in defense of domestic labor. Bernie could have countered that, which is the main reason why he was the preferred candidate against Trump.
But then, four years later, Joe Biden takes the stage and makes all the same "pro-labor" noises that Bernie is making. Plus COVID. Plus liberals being too terrified of Trump to contemplate anyone but the safest of safe bets.
Your local medical system and its workers is the reason you're alive. You'd be just as alive under a Single Payer model or a fully public health care model. Its very possible you'd be alive without the ACA, just a lot broker.
The ACA specifically prevented socialized medicine, as a hand out to insurance companies. In a lot of ways, it was the best possible deal for insurance companies. It essentially wrote into law that they must exist. If not for the ACA, we wouldn't all be paying thousands to insurance companies because they'd have been made illegal for all serious illnesses/injuries.