what are barack obama's flaws?

Look, I'm sure I'll be back to posting look-what-Obama's-done-now links tomorrow, but I can't be honest with myself and deny that Obama's been Coolidge, i.e. responsible for not a single piece of meaningful legislation in three years.

I had a Tanzanian student a few years ago who said the sudden opening of a clinic in 2004 saved his HIV-infected mom's life; she got free antiretroviral treatment. He didn't know shit about politics or history, but I knew Dubya's commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa was at least partially responsible; and I would be a blackguard not to admit it.

Generally, when pols do the right thing, it's for the wrong reasons. LBJ's social policies might've been his stab for secular sainthood.

― already president FYI (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 22, 2011 8:06 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

so what? what are the right reasons? who the fuck cares?

i think that there's enough evidence for someone who thinks that LBJ enacted his social policies for "the right reasons" to make that conclusion. dude was a schoolteacher who taught poor Latino students in Texas during the 1930s before he entered politics after all.

but yeah, does it really matter WHAT his "real reasons" were? or the "real reasons" for any politician?

what are the right reasons? who the fuck cares?

I guess the people who are fans of the politicians they vote for.

Alfred, you're making the nabisco mistake; I post here to vent, not to perform Serious Political Analysis. No interest in that.

off-topic: this is not my Field but it was my understanding that lbj had been interested in domestic anti-poverty reform since he was like five years old. anyway yeah of course he is responsible for vietnam escalation; the buck stops there. i guess the distinction i was making was that johnson's vietnam policy seems to have come more from exasperation, hawk advisers, and texas macho, whereas the expansion of the security state and the invasion of iraq were actual goals of the bush admin, the same way attacking the depression by Trying Everything was an actual goal of fdr's.

and many (if not most) people are more like Alfred's Tanzanian student than us Internet politics nerds. after the office of my parents' right-wing dickwad of a US Representative helped them out of a tight spot, there wasn't shit i could do or say to persuade them to vote for said dickwad's opponent. and i can't blame them for standing behind that guy either.

Nah, dlh: LBJ was a fervent believer in the National Security Sate.

my only point re: lbj is that lbj did not go into office thinking YOU KNOW WHAT I WOULD LIKE MY ADMINISTRATION TO BE REMEMBERED FOR? AN ENDLESS NIGHTMARISH JUNGLE WAR THAT IRREVOCABLY MANGLES THE EMPIRE'S IDEA OF ITSELF, whereas rumsfeld and cheney had been pining after iraq forever and basically proceeded as they had intended as soon as they found a pretext. and that this is a difference between presiding over (and of course being totally responsible for!) events and Leading them: being overtaken by history vs. driving it. this is not a moral argument at all.

I thought you studied JFK.

IN THAT DOCUMENT

BOWWWWWWWW

LAY THE VIETNAM WAR.

JUST GIT ME ELECTED AND AH'LL GIT YA YER DAMN WAR

also do you think even LBJ knew what the fuck his motives were? does anyone? what is this war in the heart of nature? why does nature vie-- oh, wait, came over from the terrence malick thread. sorry.

lyndon... barack... always u wrestle inside me

lyndon larouche

"For all his talk about 'winning the future' (and his undeniable intellectual gifts), Obama seems to think that solving immediate problems is the key to political victory."

http://www.tnr.com/article/not-even-past/91367/obama-presidency-roosevelt-economy-election-progressives

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

-- Barack Obama, July 2, 2011

i remember thinking back in November 2008 that the country had wisely chosen FDR over Herbert Hoover ...

Since we have no idea what the Speaker and Obama are agreeing to in their secret negotiations, Frum speculates:

And now President Obama has summoned Republicans to another round of negotiations over the debt ceiling.

Perhaps he will there deploy some previously invisible form of leverage.

To the uninstructed eye, however, it looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. This need, however, perversely puts the Republicans in the situation where if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).

i don't know that that's so different from how things usually are, now, in a climate in which depriving obama of wins has superseded the underlying political logic. perhaps having made a slightly more pronounced step towards declaring a stand-off entrenches that all, somewhat, but probably not enough to outweigh the potential benefit of doing it (standing up & calling out republicans). like the mathematics of how his concessions play pales in comparison to the narrative anyway.

i think obama obviously has a lot of personal political failings but i dont love the desire to foist the failings of our political institutions on this one guy--if he had a different view of politics or was "better at bargaining" that still wouldnt change the incentives in play, for the GOP in particular

i mean we might have had vaguely better outcomes but

him murdering caylee anthony might just cost him the re-election

yeah but if he hadnt murdered caylee the political incentives for republicans would be the same

i mean sure he should have cleared his google search history and cleaned his trunk! but the gop would have nailed him anyway

gop mom

to back away from Casey Anthony for a minute: the institutional obstacles that Obama et. al. face are indeed formidable. however, one of his key flaws is to accept them as given instead of trying to change them. as i've said before, if President McCain in 2009 enjoyed a 59/41 majority and all that was standing in his path of Total GOP Domination was the stupid filibuster, the filibuster would've been gone tout suite. actions like this were NEVER on the plate for President "change we can believe in."

he "lied" about his mom?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/us/politics/14mother.html

well that does it

I'm sure it'll pass quickly, but if the story were true--and I skimmed it very quickly--that wouldn't be good. The one thing that Obama has maintained with all the people who voted for him (outside of this board, I mean) and probably even some who didn't is his basic decency or whatever you want to call it. Pulling an Al Gore with his mother's death would really undermine that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion

feelin a lot of that, tbh

i agree with a lot of that too. obama's appeased the bullies way too much, either because he secretly agrees with them, has to appeal at the end of the day to the same power brokers the GOP does, doesn't know how to fight back, is so naive he believes he can transcend their determination to destroy him, and/or is so stuck up he refuses to fight fire with fire in terms of maintaining the dirty work of day-to-day effective messaging. i still have some hope he'll wise up and put the assholes in their place but that hope is fleeting

thought the "i'd love to offer a diagnosis here" bit was sort of unnecessarily tantalizing

especially since he sort of went ahead and did it anyways

glad these were noted --

The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts).

-- since obama's belief in the innate seriousness of dessicated phrases like "revenue enhancements" is what's finally gonna send him to hell. all that fuss about his book and he turned out just as immorally illiterate as his co-workers.

I get that O should be louder and more direct about what he wants for the country, but I read these articles and I think the same thing: it's fucking congress's job to pass the laws that the prez abides by. It's just lazy to pick off Obama from high atop the executive rather than work through congress member by member. Shit, I'd think it might even be easier to call congressional leaders on their bulshit day in and day out cause it's so thick and steamy. I do like that the O disappointment op-eds lay out what's wrong and should be right pretty well.

that's arm-chair psychoanalyzing for you. though i also liked this article.

this is an interesting rebuttal to westen's thing in the sunday 'times'

http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2011/08/lover-of-fairy-tales-casts-obama-as.html

yeah i thought that westen piece was okay but for an essay ostensibly about politics it didnt seem very interested in the specifics of the last couple years

i dunno the whole "if only he had tried harder wed have [a bigger stimulus/the public option]" counterfactual will never go away, obviously.

i tend to think that the difference in terms of actual policy--if obama had been more vocal--would probably be minimal. but i think he *should* be making arguments, using the bully pulpit, etc., more frequently, just to make everyone feel better.

but i think he *should* be making arguments, using the bully pulpit, etc., more frequently, just to make everyone feel better.

i wonder to what extent people would feel better , even if things were going the exact same way, if obama was explicitly calling out the GOP on their shit - calling every deal a half-cooked deal, making more of those 'we wouldn't be a good country w/o it' defences of welfare, chiding repubs for obstructionism &c.

i agree with max. his silence created a vacuum redneck pundits occupied a long time ago and own now. the whole white house communication team sucks. i think they've played this like stuck up types who can't be bothered to convince jane six-pack and johnny reb that republican policies are fucking them over

One Elias Isquith's response:

I like your work, Andrew, but this is not a good rebuttal. I don't want to go through it point by point as you did Westen because I know that a blog post is not quite a dissertation and thus the truth can be obscured sometimes with an overzealous focus on detail.

I'm just going to say that block-quoting disparate moments in which Obama, in dry, technocratic, and professorial language, lays out the reasoning for his policies (which, certainly in the case of loaning capital to banks on the theory that they'll send it back to Main St. with the "multiplier effect" has been proven to be wrong) is not at all a refutation of Westen's central critique: Obama did not tell succinct, easily transferable, and repeated stories. You're a smart man and an often able blogger, so I find it somewhat baffling that you think a long, bloodless summing-up after a 5-hour health care reform summit (that precious few people watched) is somehow the equivalent of what Westen's looking for. This is absurd.

Otherwise, I don't understand why you feel the need to so passionately and with some pique denounce Westen for making observations as to the personal and political motivations of Obama's moves as of late. It's not significantly different from what you or countless other bloggers have done; most definitely, to call it "character assassination" for Westen to reach the conclusion that Obama is playing for the independent vote (when there have been many articles, most notably the recent effort from Elizabeth Drew in the NYRB, with sources saying exactly the same) is to define-down "character assassination" to such a degree as to render it a meaningless aspersion.

I sympathize with your desire to protest against what you see as unfair attacks on the President; but for all your talk of good faith, I don't think you approached Westen's (admittedly imperfect) piece with quite as much grace and levity as this post would imply.

obama's biggest flaw is probably being a war criminal

nobody's perfect

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkjm3eSssu1qb7ss5o1_400.jpg

replace with Boehner and Obama faces

and he has a terrible vert. that's a huge hole in his bball game

even if things were going the exact same way, if obama was explicitly calling out the GOP on their shit

This doesn't compute to me. If he was terming their shit as such, he presumably wdn't be able to swallow it.

But re the Times, the problem isn't that he lacks passion, it's that he's just another asshole.

lol that blog post:

Westen stoops to unfounded allegations about character and motive that almost amount to character assassination: Obama's stories lack villains because he has to keep raising campaign dollars

a heinous accusation!

i do think the western article is kinda garbage

“Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president is the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.”