what are barack obama's flaws?

yeah 10 is a lot tbh! he is clearly a major president.

reagan looking like one of the best is one of the reasons this is such a depressing exercise

also W is prob as effective as those three, in the sense of having had an effect, lol, tho clearly not "successful" even in the respect-your-nemeses reagan sense

He's more than an avatar for black voters.

Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge and Reagan the only presidents in 20th century who got a followed by someone from their own party without having to die or resign for it. And with both Roosevelt and Coolidge that followup presidency kinda ended in disaster.

I think Obama's biggest flaw is that he never really loved the parts of the job that required a lot of politicking. I don't think his personality was well suited for that.

The other phenomenon with these presidents is that their considerable flaws (I mean, LBJ and Reagan's mortal sins are easy to list) matter less than how they shifted the political culture.

dlh is such an excellent poster, just saying like!

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/obama-biggest-achievements-213487

Domestically, Obama accomplished a ton. He was the perfecr centrist Democratic president. Whatever limitations he had were the limitations of that particular form of politics. For instance, he was never going to nationalize the banks or propose free college or whatever — that would uave taken a different kind of president.

I’ll never understand the drone war. I guess it was a really awful way of “managing” these terrorist organizations without devoting the resources to summarily defeat them (which in any case would be impossible, as the Bush wars proved)? It seemed like he was just resigned to an idea of perpetual war in the Middle East and North Africa...

btw did anyone read david garrow's huge obama bio from earlier this year? haven't picked it up yet but i gathered from the reviews that garrow's stance was that obama was basically a failed president, which seemed to account for a lot of the negative reaction to it.

The instruments necessary to end the seemingly perpetual war(s) in MENA are too enormous for even the largest POTUS to wield, clumsily or otherwise.

I think he was a pretty great foreign policy president all considered but we’re basically ceding all those gains now (Cuba, China, two state solution, etc) and then some

By the feeble yardstick I mentioned these are the presidents in chronological order about whom I can say they changed political culture and got shit, good and terrible, done.

Washington
Jefferson
Jackson
Polk
Lincoln
Wilson
FDR
Ike
LBJ
Reagan
Obama

The military stuff provokes a lot of dissonance for me because it’s impossible for me to not love what Obama stood for, as a black president who won by convincing voters that America was better than it was. He wanted to transcend the ugliness of factional politics and all the bigotries and resentments that underwrite it. And this was impossible and I guess led to a return of the repressed in the form of Trump, and the tea party before that. But still — he did a good job selling the idea of America’s legitimacy to this cynical millennial who was a teenager during the Bush years.

return of the repressed in the form of Trump

return of the what now? when did we start repressing white people again?

That’s a Freudian term. I meant liberals were able to repress their knowledge of the intractability of racism because we elected a black president. 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

alfred's prez-significance list seems solid to me (tho i'd replace ike with truman, i think).

i couldn't imagine rating obama above washington, lincoln, or FDR, but his worst policies (drone program, dragging out endgame in iraq and afghanistan, you could argue he could've gotten more done in the first two years and i wouldn't disagree) don't seem in the same class as those of LBJ (vietnam), wilson (racist, worst civil liberties record of any prez), or jackson (you know).

That’s a Freudian term. I meant liberals were able to repress their knowledge of the intractability of racism

And I know this was a privileged perspective etc but I think a lot of people from all kinds of backgrounds felt moved by his election and what it might portend for the future of this country. “Hope” was his brand and, to me, the whole Trump thing felt first and foremost like a cruel repudiation of this hope, which was painful, I think, even for people who maybe came to see what Obama stood for as naive.

I thought about Truman, dealt a bad hand after FDR's death (failing to give a shit about a vice president when he, the president, was dying and so much shit was left to strikes me as FDR's most grievous sin after the interment camps), and inheriting a post-New Deal landscape. Ike stands out for (a) empowering the hidden government, CIA, to wage the covert war we couldn't admit to fighting (b) being a Republican who dealt with reality, i.e. the New Deal ain't going anywhere. It took Reagan to begin the dismantling.

I'd say Grant deserves a serious reevaluation (and has gotten one!) for being the only president -- GOP or Democrat -- to genuinely care about keeping the federal government's promises to the freedmen, and Teddy R. for understanding PR.

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/