what are barack obama's flaws?

you mean cuz he got ppl who don't like blowjobs to vote for him?

man you guys are not voting for obama so much

he courted swingdick voters.

if only you could not vote for obama more than you're gonna not vote for obama

Bloomberg 2016, amirite

I'm not voting for Obama either.

i was going to vote for obama, but then he used a mythologizing conceit in his re-election campaign

lol my vote for obama cancels out morbs non-vote

omama there goes that bam

none of you are of sufficient power to cancel out anything I generate, actively or passively

no im p sure you only get one vote & so do i

what if he doesn't vote

you can't cancel out a 0

http://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000003878597-oc3w2e-crop.jpg?10e4608

I am not a number, I am a free man

none of you are of sufficient power to cancel out anything I generate, actively or passively

― already president FYI (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 16 June 2011 02:42 (23 minutes ago)

whoa

Dr Morbius IS the electoral college

none of you are of sufficient power to cancel out anything I generate, actively or passively

― already president FYI (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 16 June 2011 02:42 (23 minutes ago)

tbh i read this and nodded

*resets bookmark*

Obama this morning, echoing LBJ: "There goes the ILX vote for a generation."

feel like he's ignoring us. no big speeches lately, or worldclass villain kills

HE'S A FAN OF THE BEARS

I'm glad Greenwald raises these flags, but isn't Obama's mythical aura really a strawman by this point? Other than clemenza on this board, I know no liberal who still thinks Obama deserves admiration.

this is otm, even the most ardent O supporter's position right now is "look, yes, you're right, a lot of that shit is contemptible and can't be defended but here's some good things he did and there aren't going to be any better viable alternatives"

laughed hard when i got the Dinner? email and it was right under an email from the ACLU: "The FBI wants your garbage."

like how am i going to enjoy dinner with the president while i'm worrying about that now

from what i understand the dinner is going to be pretty informal, no big issues on the table, maybe even in dressing gowns, a tv blaring, with re-heated food from a prior banquet

they should turn the dinner into a ride, like, actors break into the restaurant and try to kidnap the president, dinner pals are given extremely realistic-looking laser tag guns that activate squibs in the suits of secret service agents dressed up in turbans/trucker hats, everyone is brought together in delight at end, maybe given enormous check.

also at least this dinner will fix denny's' image problem

he'd be the strongest gop candidate for president?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/06/21/lind_obama_republican/index.html

In spite of the prospect of years of mass unemployment, Barack Obama, in the spirit of the budget-balancing Rubinomics of the 1990s and Ike-onomics of the 1950s, has called for freezing discretionary spending except for defense. He has allowed the conversation to be shifted from recovery to long-term fiscal consolidation, which conservatives will try to use as an excuse to partly replace Social Security and Medicare with mandatory private accounts that will generate lucrative fees for Wall Street and the insurance industry from a huge captive population of American fee-payers.

If he were to run for the Republican nomination, Obama could point out that in the past few years he has already done far more to thwart American liberalism than any of his rivals in the GOP primary have done in their entire careers. He could boast that when liberal economists called for the temporary nationalization of insolvent megabanks, forcing shareholders to swallow their losses and firing their managers, he stood firm and protected Wall Street.

Sullivan praises him as the best kind of Eisenhower Republican.

kinda seems like a vince mcmahon storyline

"sentences you never thought you'd hear back in 2001"

obama's no ike.

Contrary to what Alfred thinks, I don't object to (or automatically disagree with) criticism of Obama. As I explained elsewhere, there's enough of it on this and the political thread that I don't feel the need to join in when I agree. The only kind of criticism I'm not a fan of is a) the kind that's hysterical (hello, Tea Party) or dripping with sarcasm (fill in the blank).

I thought this from Sullivan the other day was very fair and accurate:

"But he will have presided over it [i.e., gay equality, but he meant for the statement to encompass a lot of things], not led it. I think that's how he sees the presidency as a whole. As a national community organizer, whose job it is to guide, shape but follow.

It's phrased mildly, but it's a serious indictment.

Sarcasm is an utterly justifiable response to this bloody snake-oil salesman and his apologists.

Well, you can say whatever you want to say in whatever way you want to say it. Whether or not it matters to you that someone else takes the time to think about what you've said, that's an individual call.

I don't see how its a "serious indictment" any more than it would have been of any other 20 century prez post fdr.

another great Michael Lind quote re Obama (in reaction to the 2010 State of the Union address):

Future generations of American progressives, if there are any, will shake their heads at this mixture of right-wing market fundamentalism and hippie-ish green romanticism and try to figure out where the Democrats went wrong. Let's hope that those future generations are not investigating the origins of a second era of Republican conservative hegemony.

my quibble with Morbz over his characterization of Obama as a "snake-oil salesman" lies in the fact that by 2008 it was pretty clear from all of the best evidence (e.g., his voting record, his books, and who was giving him money to run for office) that Obama wasn't going to be much different than (Bill or Hillary) Clinton. (i don't really care much about what any of these bozos say on the campaign trail and i pity those who do.) Rockefeller Republicanism a la Bill Clinton may have been a defensible position in the 1990s, when the US wasn't at war, the economy was doing well and some of the damage done to working Americans during Reagan-Bush years was slowly being undone. by 2008 - with the US in two costly wars and on the brink of a global economic depression - something much bolder was needed. that "something" sure wasn't going to come from the GOP, and all that was left was the hope that Obama et. al. would put aside their New Democratic weak-tea and remember the party's New Deal/Great Society tradition. one can be disappointed that such hopes were in vain, but how can anyone be surprised that the Obama Admin. has turned out the way it has?

snake oil:

"I will close Guantanamo"

"Main Street > Wall Street"

"curb renditions, military trials"

I don't see how its a "serious indictment" any more than it would have been of any other 20 century prez post fdr

I don't think it's hard to find presidents who've been more pro-active than Obama. (In circumstances more favorable to being pro-active, I'd argue, though many don't accept that.) I think Sullivan describes Obama's mindset accurately.

Dubya and his minions led, whether you think he was the chief or the front man

lots of presidents lead. the only kind of president that hasn't led since fdr is a democratic president. even johnson more "presided over" than "led" escalation in vietnam, although the moral distinction is probably trivial.

I always thought escalation was very much LBJ's doing--or am I just accepting the Oliver Stone version of history?

The following is lifted from this piece:

More damaging to LBJ's standing, however, was his escalation in Vietnam. "I knew from the start," he told a writer, "that...if I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--for that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home." But, fearing that Republican conservatives would hurt the Democrats badly if he withdrew from Vietnam without victory, he made a resolution. "I will not be the first president to lose a war," he said...He had sent 550,000 U.S. troops to South Vietnam by 1967, a vast increase from the 16,000 that had been there when he succeeded to the presidency in November 1963.

my quibble with Morbz over his characterization of Obama as a "snake-oil salesman" lies in the fact that by 2008 it was pretty clear from all of the best evidence (e.g., his voting record, his books, and who was giving him money to run for office) that Obama wasn't going to be much different than (Bill or Hillary) Clinton. (i don't really care much about what any of these bozos say on the campaign trail and i pity those who do.)

True. Partly we like to carp. That his foreign policy would mimic the worst of Bush's was obvious in the spring and summer of 2008. But I did not expect Obama to in some cases accelerate the worst of Bush's National Security State: rendition, the pursuit of whistleblowers, its cravenness re the trying of terrorism suspects. Similarly, I was disgusted by his courting of Wall Street types, but didn't foresee the surrender on the Bush tax cuts.

LBJ definitely has to shoulder the brunt of the blame for escalation in vietnam. i wonder what the country would look like today if he'd stayed out and focused all his political capital on passing the great society. maybe the biggest 'what if' in u.s. history, after reconstruction.

while a lot of signs pointed straight to obama being clinton-lite at best, i admit i had held out some crazy hope that he'd rise to the occasion, FDR-style. at the very least i didn't expect an actual constitutional scholar to wind up embracing the bush-cheney-yoo view of executive power.

In my case I also underestimated the liberalness of the last Congress, but even more than Clinton and Obama, senators and representatives have inched rightward since Reagan and Bush clobbered them twenty years ago.

* no "but"

i haven't read through this read but i think the way this question is posed and when is really profound. it really does seem to reveal how much obama, despite not having governed very much, was at one point a vessel for progressive hopes (owing to his associations and community-organizer background).