what are barack obama's flaws?

yeah i think "grant was hopelessly corrupt and bad, also a degenerate" was/is a disguised component of the lost-cause idea cluster

Yep. It also flummoxed historians as intelligent as Eric Josephson that corrupt-to-their-toenails pols like Roscoe Conkling genuinely supported black voting rights and social liberty for them.

Harding is another president dying to be wrest from several decades of obloquy. Certainly between TR and FDR he was more generous toward enemies and had a solid Cabinet. No great or even good president but not awful like celebrated ones like Jackson and Wilson.

er, Matthew Josephson

I'd put Teddy Roosevelt on that list and remove Wilson + LBJ for having their late presidencies basically destroyed by failed foreign policy. Didn't Harding have an amazingly corrupt cabinet?

Warren Harding earned his obloquy so masterfully that he deserves his own thread of flaws.

Teddy didn't do much except masterfully promote himself as trustbuster and as Great Father.

incidentally, the guy in office now killed more civilians in his first seven months than obama did in eight years:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-has-already-killed-more-civilians-obama-us-fight-against-isis-653564

Never heard of the UK-based group cited in that article, but they seem to think there were only about 3000 civilian deaths under Obama, which if you read the NYTMag story on Iraqi deaths last month seems totally fucking ludicrous.

He's more than an avatar for black voters.

ICYMI

"(This) paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis, the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and so homeowners were left to drown.

"As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013."

http://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/12/07/destruction-of-black-wealth-during-the-obama-presidency/

The Trump vs Obama data wrt drones only covers anti-ISIS action in Iraq and Syria - not any of the other people being bombed fwiw.

isn't the gist of that Presidential Policy Guidance May 22 2013 document, that he alone was effectively judge/jury/executioner + would sign off on death from the skies, without any further scrutiny of data on targets? Well anyways, at least they got the Nobel Peace prize in early doors.

Obama quite purposefully spoke in universal terms whenever possible, emphasizing commonalities over differences, and it was all for nought because his very existence still provoked insane, delirious backlash on the right, his modest reformism caricatured in the most extreme terms

And it didn't (and probably nothing ever could) stop the eventual rightwing line on him being that he played the race card and sowed racial division every time he opened his mouth.

isn't the gist of that Presidential Policy Guidance May 22 2013 document, that he alone was effectively judge/jury/executioner + would sign off on death from the skies, without any further scrutiny of data on targets?

― calzino, 29. december 2017 10:47 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not really, no

The guidance just codifies what was standard practice prior to 2013 iirc - but the problem isn’t the internal regulations, it’s the illegality of the whole system, the normalisation of endlessly bombing countries with no international remit, constantly lying about the scale of civilian casualties, etc, etc. The 2013 guidance winds people up because it adds a procedural sheen of ‘doing things the right and proper way’ to a programme that routinely kills 40-odd people for every one it is supposed to be targeting.

From what I just read of its specious waffle is that it was drawn up to make the "signature strikes" look more considered than the random murder of civilians they often were.

It supposedly does take drone strikes away from the CIA, which at least in theory is good. But yeah, the problem is with the whole system, which is why it's faulty to lay the blame at Obama's feet, and especially at the 2013 PPG.

obama was in charge of the system iirc

that is also what I recall. Obama essentially defined the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqeQ_PfKMAo

Obama inherited the system. and once he did an effort to define it, in 2013, the system seems to have become less deadly.

has anyone actually engaged with the PPP paper or nah

PPG. I've read it, yeah, and skimmed it again these last few days. It's here: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/presidential_policy_guidance_0.pdf?redirect=TDM/PPG

I don't understand a lot of it :) But it's also a fairly weird document, as it's a change to rules that weren't public before, so it's tough to tell if it's good or bad.

I was referring to the People's Policy Project paper Morbs linked, actually

la la la they can't read it

i mean duh, Obama HAD to prop up Wall Street and HAD to let the torturers walk, be an ADULT!

Oh, right. No, it kinda put me off that they seemed to think Obama became president in 2007?

the relevant dept only releases its data every 3 yrs so the dataset started with '07 to observe the trend

Obama HAD to prop up Wall Street and HAD to let the torturers walk

These are highly legitimate beefs against Obama and high among the worst policy decisions he made, imo. They stink to high heaven.

Then again, in the presidential shitfest sweepstakes, FDR interred (according to Wikipedia) "between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast. 62 percent of the internees were United States citizens." Those internees also did forced labor.

Nobody comes out the presidency smelling like a rose. There are always intense political pressures to do shitty things and unsurprisingly, politics, not ethics, rule the job.

FDR had a bit of a weakness for Mussolini as well iirc, but lots of big names had a dabble with fascism back then, before it was finally defeated forever. *ba-dum-bum-CHING*

I would love to read a serious analysis of the failures of Obama housing policy, but that PPP isn't it. A lot of the analysis is based not on research but on left-wing blogs, and the really awful thing Obama apparently did, he did in 2008 where, again, he wasn't president.

Average monthly job growth in 2017 was 171,000 jobs per month — down significantly from the 187,000 jobs per month that were added in 2016.

thanks obama

Obama’s supporters remain as defensive about their president as Trump’s fans are about theirs, even though Obama, kite-surfing with Richard Branson in the wake of Trump’s victory, and reassuring Wall Street with handsomely remunerated speeches, has affirmed his dedication to the one percent. But we should not be surprised and dismayed that Obama’s audacity of hope dwindled into some humdrum self-cherishing, or that Macron is now derided as “president of the rich.” The actual record of personality cults reveals the mendacity of hope. Real change always comes through the sustained struggles of countless people who often wish to remain unsung.

The meaning of consistent striving, modest self-image, and quiet solidarity in politics is mostly lost today, partly because the last great mass movements for change in the West—the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements—occurred decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s. During their long absence, decreed by the ideological conceit coined by Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, the scope for collection action shrank. Glamorous individuals are increasingly tasked with working miracles. But in societies bitterly polarized by social and economic inequality, the appeal of such figureheads—whether expressed as “Yes, we can,” “Make American great again,” or “En Marche!”—is inevitably limited to specific constituencies. In this demoralizingly fragmented political landscape, many people end up bestowing their hopes upon celebrities with whom they can gratifyingly identify.

It was this politics of narcissistic identification, of fanciful private bonding with the famous, that set us up for, first, the disappointment with Obama, and then, the appalling shock of Trump.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/01/this-poisonous-cult-of-personality/

glosses over obama coming to office while the economy shed a million jobs a month and foreclosures and evictions were an epidemic. comparing where obama and trump started and their accomplishments a year into trump's administration is dicey on lots of levels

The meaning of consistent striving, modest self-image, and quiet solidarity in politics is mostly lost today, partly because the last great mass movements for change in the West—the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements—occurred decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s. During their long absence, decreed by the ideological conceit coined by Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, the scope for collection action shrank.

This glosses over the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the alterglobalization movement, and the early aughts anti-war movement, all of which were mass protest movements. To imagine the sense of solidarity lost among the public today presumes it was there to begin with, when studies of these golden era movements suggest they were decentralized activations of people who felt a sense of commonality with their immediate communities knit together into national narratives by canny strategists & the media. The skill in organizing social movements is in looking at what is and having the vision to imagine what can be done. To look at the landscape today and see it as smaller is a failure of imagination, not a triumph of No Alternative.

fair enough, HOOS, but i guess i'm results-oriented enough to downgrade the early-aughts antiwar movement bcz they didn't stop any wars.

Neither did the antiwar movement in the seventies, though?

name any antiwar movement that has

that column is very dumb

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century

he was also the second president of the twenty-first century

Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.

thinking emoji

you know, after O's duty to the financiers destroyed black homeowning (see above)

and round and round we go

I think there was something else to the housing crisis other than Obama's policies, though?

but the topic at hand is stfu fred

I would love to read a serious analysis of the failures of Obama housing policy, but that PPP isn't it. A lot of the analysis is based not on research but on left-wing blogs,

I'm scanning through the sources and while there are a few left-wing sources, there's also a fair amount of stuff from court transcripts, government reports, and mainstream media (specifically WaPo/NYT/WSJ/Reuters).

and the really awful thing Obama apparently did, he did in 2008 where, again, he wasn't president.

Nope.

The recession was addressed in first months of the Obama administration, with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an economic stimulus of $831 billion.19 For homeowners, the largest source of potential relief offered early in the Obama administration was a piece of the bank bailout called the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (hamp). In the rush to pass the bailout in the last months of the Bush administration, a bloc of Democrats refused to vote unless it contained some provision for homeowner relief in addition to bank money.

Still, these struggling homeowners did not get the hundreds of billions in cash and trillions in credit that the banks got. Instead, they got an unspecified appropriation to “prevent avoidable foreclosures,” specifically
mentioning the possibility of lowering interest rates or principal amounts for homeowners, but leaving the execution entirely up to the president. The Obama administration responded to this provision by allocating
$75 billion to mortgage relief. In a memo to lawmakers, the White House promised to "reduce the number of preventable foreclosures by helping to reduce mortgage payments for economically stressed but responsible homeowners, while also reforming our bankruptcy laws and strengthening existing housing initiatives.22 Unfortunately, the program would neither be funded nor managed well enough to protect families, especially black families, as the financial crisis unfolded.

"In 2008, Obama pressured lawmakers to take such a provision out of the bank bailout and the Recovery Act, promising he would push for it later,64 with Larry Summers promising bankruptcy reform in writing.22 Then, under the influence of Tim Geithner and Summers, he reneged."

The footnote 64 is to 'Shadowproof'.

That's the thing that he definitely, absolutely, completely - if you believe the sketchy sources - did on his own. The other way the crisis could have 'easily' been averted was if he'd revived a famously racist program from the 30's, removed the racism from it, and passed it through congress. That's not solely on him, though.

how can anything a president does be *solely* his fault, though? that seems like a dodge

also isn't all contemporary US policy basically just old policy with the (overt) racism taken out lol

No. Because if you take out the racism, you can't pass it.

The footnote 64 is to 'Shadowproof'.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, January 9, 2018 6:35 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... a post that's a transcript of a joint obama/donna edwards statement where obama certainly appears to "promise he'd push for it later"

https://shadowproof.com/2008/10/03/donna-edwards-explains-her-yes-vote-on-bailout/

I *think* Fred was just stating what the number signified

ya but am i wrong in thinking, fred, that you named its location at shadowproof to reiterate insufficient rigor in the report?