He gave a speech and Democrats creamed all over themselves.
He was going to save the world. He was going to transcend politics. He was going to—
Unless you lived through that insane period you can’t believe the nonsense otherwise sensible people were spouting about what Barack Obama was going to do.
My sister couldn’t understand why I wasn’t supporting Barack Obama. Everyone else was.
Well, not everyone.
There were those of us who wanted someone who had a record, someone that we could point to and say, I have a pretty good idea of what kind of president that candidate will be because that’s the kind of senator she was. (OK, I was supporting Hillary Clinton, but there were other candidates as well who had records that one could point to.)
Barack Obama had no record to speak of. He had made a speech and suddenly those who fell under his spell were projecting what kind of candidate they wanted him to be. And they were wildly fantasizing about it. Democrats can be just as stupid as Republicans. Well, stupid in their own way.
And so we got saddled with another president who was grossly unfit for office.
And he never seemed to improve.
The Republicans were determined to make his administration fail, that was their number one priority, they even said so. And Obama seemed to think that he could charm them or use reason and logic on them, no matter how many times it failed. He never seemed to learn.
He had no idea how to negotiate. Instead of asking for way more than what he wanted so he’d have room to compromise, he’d ask for just exactly what he wanted.
He inherited a terrible economy, the Great Recession, but the solution that he accepted was much too small to address the problem. Various economists including Paul Krugman lobbied for a much larger stimulus package. Krugman wrote: “And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have – that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support.”
He didn’t get his stupid bipartisan support (duh!), and the failure to really help many Americans helped pave the way for his successor.
Obama was an idiot from the beginning and he never learned.
Nor did he lead.
He was opposed to same sex marriage—until a majority of Americans were in favor of it, and then suddenly his position had “evolved”.
His signature achievement, which came to be called Obamacare derisively by Republicans, should probably be called Pelosicare, because it was Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who did the heavy lifting and got it pushed through congress.
And then there was that White House Corespondents Dinner. There had been an ongoing “controversy” in right-wing circles about Obama’s birth certificate with failed real estate developer and “reality” TV show star Donald Trump leading the charge. With Trump in attendance Obama finally produced his birth certificate, which embarrassed Trump, and it’s believed that that is when Trump decided to run for president. While it’s true that Obama couldn’t have known the consequences of his little stunt, he could have avoided attending the Correspondents Dinner, something that many sensible folks have been advising presidents to do for years.
When he was up for re-election, I refused to vote for him. And yes, I checked the polls again. Had I thought that his GOP challenger had a chance of winning the Pennsylvania electoral votes, I would have held my nose and voted for Obama, but I didn’t have to.
By the way, if you’ve been reading all my presidential posts, you may have noticed a common theme. To wit, that I have strong feelings about candidates who don’t have a record of federal experience. I want to vote for someone who knows how the federal system works and who has some sort of record of votes so that I can judge how they might vote in the future. It’s true that past history is no guarantee of future performance, but it at least gives me something to consider.
That’s why I don’t like people like that mayor of a tiny hamlet who suddenly decided he could run for president. What’s his name? Buttface, or something like that. People like that just piss me off.
Anyway, we were talking about Obama. I’d like to give him a double thumbs down, but that would just be my emotions talking. So one thumb down it is.