Reap as Ye sow . . .

[BoSoxGal]

The Republicans tried to sink Obama. Instead, the party imploded. ~ Richard Wolffe, The Guardian

It may seem too early to call, but we already have a winner in the 2016 election.

He’s someone the pundits wrote off long ago. An improbable outsider who rode an insurgent wave to snatch the nomination from the establishment. An unconventional politician whose raucous rallies underscored his appeal to voters far outside his party base.

His name is Barack Obama. And he can thank the freak show that is Donald Trump’s Republican party for restoring his stature as a unifying, national leader with a moderated and mature approach to a complex and unstable world.

Eight years ago, Obama represented an existential threat to the Republican party, and not just because he was going to lead the Democratic party to win the White House and Congress by large margins.

No, Obama’s biggest threat was that he could realign American politics, shifting it fundamentally towards progressives for a generation. He and his campaign aides talked privately of being the Reagan of the left: a transformative figure who would leave an indelible legislative mark at home and restore America’s position on the world stage.

With his appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, Obama could break the Republican party as a national force. With his appeal to minority voters – a rapidly emerging majority across the country – he could lock in the fastest growing demographics that could turn red states blue.

So the GOP leadership chose to make Obama unacceptable, unpalatable and un-American. On the night of his first inauguration, House Republican leaders met at a Washington steakhouse to plot their path back to power. They would not reform their policies or consider the root cause of their defeat. Instead, they would oppose Obama on everything, well before he tried to pass a giant stimulus bill or healthcare reform.

They needed to deny him a reputation for bipartisanship and mainstream politics, and they succeeded. He wasn’t reasonable; he was an ideologue. His vision of healthcare reform wasn’t a free-market system based on Republican plans; it was a socialist takeover that would destroy the American way of life. He was inviting terrorist attacks on the homeland, not hunting down Osama bin Laden. He was acting in unconstitutional ways because he wasn’t really American at all.

The party of Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Roger Ailes had turned him into their own kind of freak.

Before he finished his second year in office, Obama was such an object of Republican loathing that the Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell could say – with impunity – that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If your political priorities are the total defeat of a single politician – not the advancement of your own policies through debate or legislation – then you are already in pretty desperate shape. You render it impossible to compromise with your opponents, and you fan the flames of extremism that will burn anyone in the center.

You also look weak and foolish when you lose, surrendering the stage to someone who can vilify his opponents better than you. So don’t look dazed and confused at Donald Trump when he runs your playbook more convincingly than your own team. It’s too late to fret about endorsing his kooky positions – like deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, treating all Muslims as enemies and blowing up the deficit – when they are only logical extensions of your own.

After eight years of conservative caricature, you may be forgiven for thinking that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist with terrorist sympathies and job-destroying policies on healthcare and bank regulation.

Of course, if you live inside the echo chamber of Fox News and rightwing talk radio, you have to ignore the pesky fact that unemployment now stands at 4.9%. That’s lower than when Reagan left office in 1988, and it’s lower than when Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996.

The rate stood at 8.3% in Obama’s first full month in office, and not much below that when he won re-election. For a president with a job-killing economic plan, that’s not a shabby performance.

Sure enough, Obama’s approval ratings (52%) are almost identical to Reagan’s in August 1988 (53%) and a dramatic contrast to those of George W Bush (32%) in 2008. One of these Republican presidents was succeeded by his own vice-president; the other was succeeded by Barack Obama.

This should lead to some serious soul-searching inside the Republican party. Not a post-mortem about how to reach out to Latino voters, but a dismantling of the politics of personal destruction, and the creation of a new, hopeful agenda that can appeal to the mainstream.

Instead, the only point of unity inside the GOP is its gleeful hatred of Hillary Clinton, and its thinly veiled disdain for a nominee who has yet to find a politician he can’t insult.

The Republican party did not entirely fail to destroy Barack Obama. For a few years, aided by the great recession, they almost succeeded. But then they contrived to revive him by nominating a man who would destroy everything Obama stood for, along with much of the free world as we know it.

The rise of Trump has led, perversely, to the revival of Obama. Republican candidates are saying they will not vote for their presidential nominee, and the party’s national security officials are lining up to condemn Trump as a reckless danger to the Republic. How could the incumbent not look like a statesman compared to a man who apparently can’t be trusted with the elevator button, never mind a nuclear one?

Inside the White House, Obama’s aides talk about a president liberated from previous constraint. On the trail, and at the podium, he seems to love campaigning against his orange nemesis. His party’s candidates can’t get enough of him, and his potential successor – instead of putting distance between them – believes Obama doesn’t get enough credit for his economic achievements.

This one-term president is having an unusually successful end to his second term, and for that he can thank the Republicans who were so determined to destroy him.

[MajGenl.Meade]

He's a nothing and a nobody. That puts him head and shoulders above both candidates

[Lord Jim]

What a load...

After winning the election in 2008 claiming he would be "post partisan"...

Within days after taking Office he told McConnell and Boehner that "elections have consequences" and he turned the whole stimulus package over to Pelosi and her committee chairing henchmen ...

Transforming a serious infrastructure investment bill into the MOAP...(Mother Of All Pork)...

A bill that combined a payoff to the public sector employee unions with the most economically ineffective tax cut in the history of tax cuts...(the two-pizza-a-month tax cut... Democrats designing an effective tax cut is like Republicans designing an effective welfare program...they just don't know how to do it...)

The ill-advised decision to turn the stimulus package over to Pelosi destroyed the credibility of his Presidency within days of his taking Office, and he never recovered...

[BoSoxGal]

Destroyed his credibility with who? The Republican Party leadership? The Republican Party base? Two groups quickly becoming irrelevant by their association with Chump.

History will look kindly on President Obama.

[MajGenl.Meade]

About as much as it does on... who was that guy again? Oh yeah, William Harrison, the one before the other one.

Obama will be remembered for two things; one of them is actually doing something (HCA). The other is an accident of the brief elaboration of a tube.

[Burning Petard]

Oh, I think history will remember him also as the president who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while conducting war on multiple fronts during his entire two terms. [never mind where responsibility for those wars actually should go--he was still sitting at the desk that once said 'the buck stops here']

snailgate

[Lord Jim]

I think he will be remembered first and foremost for being the first African American President...(no small achievement; all props for that)

I think he will be remembered secondarily as a cautionary tale for the danger of US inaction...

He will be remembered as a weak and essentially ineffectual President, who was so obsessed with not engaging in what he saw as the "over-reach" of his predecessor that he imperiled the country, and made the world a more dangerous place with "under-reach"...

Unlike The Vile Mr. Trump, I do not at all question Mr. Obama's patriotism or loyalty to the country...

I'm quite certain that when he was withdrawing from Iraq, and not providing US military leaders with the troop numbers they were requesting to have an effective "surge" in Afghanistan, and sitting on his hands for years regarding the developments in Syria, and failing to follow up the take down of Gaddafi with sufficient support for the pro-western forces, he honestly and sincerely believed that he was acting (or not acting) in the best interests of the United States...

I do not question his patriotism or his loyalty to the country...

His judgement on the other hand, sucks...

[MajGenl.Meade]

I think he will be remembered first and foremost for being the first African American President...

That's what I said - the brief elaboration of a tube. And it's not something he did but something voters did. Props to them.

[RayThom]

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the "brief elaboration of a tube"*

*... a temporary human form that will someday soon cease to be...

[rubato]

The extreme partisanship of the past 16 years has been 90% the Republicans doing.

As has been proven many times over.


Obama will be recognized as one of the best presidents since Truman who labored under some of the greatest difficulties* and thwarted by the party that created Trump. (*created by BushCO and continued by the GOP since then).




yrs,
rubato

[Bicycle Bill]

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the "brief elaboration of a tube"*

*... a temporary human form that will someday soon cease to be...

You know, I can name at least four other Canadian singer/songwriters off the top of my head —
● Gordon Lightfoot
● Joni Mitchell
● Stan Rogers
● k.d. lang
(I was going to include Celine Dion as well, but so far as I know she doesn't write her own material)

Any one of them is better than Leonard Cohen, and that's taking into account that Rogers has been dead for over thirty years.

-"BB"-

[oldr_n_wsr]

You know, I can name at least four other Canadian singer/songwriters off the top of my head —
● Gordon Lightfoot
● Joni Mitchell
● Stan Rogers
● k.d. lang

don't forget
● Niel Percival Young

[Lord Jim]

The extreme partisanship of the past 16 years has been 90% the Republicans doing.

As has been proven many times over.


Obama will be recognized as one of the best presidents since Truman who labored under some of the greatest difficulties* and thwarted by the party that created Trump. (*created by BushCO and continued by the GOP since then).

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the "brief elaboration of a tube"*

*... a temporary human form that will someday soon cease to be...

You know, I can name at least four other Canadian singer/songwriters off the top of my head —
● Gordon Lightfoot
● Joni Mitchell
● Stan Rogers
● k.d. lang
(I was going to include Celine Dion as well, but so far as I know she doesn't write her own material)

Any one of them is better than Leonard Cohen, and that's taking into account that Rogers has been dead for over thirty years.

-"BB"-

And Bruce Coburn. "If I had a rocket launcher"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w

[Big RR]

Jim--I have to agree; blame the republicans all you want, but the simple fact is that Obama was not up to the job of working with them and, thus, little got done, and a lot of what did get through (like Obamacare) was far from what was needed. It might be unfair to downgrade his job performance because the others were hard to deal with, but that's the job (it's kind of like saying a salesman is doing a great job because the people he is supposed to sell to are jerks). That was the job, and I'd rate him only fair at it.

The other thing I think Obama will be remembered for is being a pretty efficient trampler of civil liberties, and a champion of surveillance and other suspensions of civil rights. Oh, he talked about closing gitmo and about enhanced interrogation, but then he expanded the use of drones into even non combat areas to take out persons (even American citizens), championed the NSA programs and defended them by tying procedurally them up in courts rather than allowing the courts to rule on them substantively, and went after people with a vengeance who dared to expose this. He's left a legacy that he will be rightfully blamed for.

[Lord Jim]

Jim--I have to agree; blame the republicans all you want, but the simple fact is that Obama was not up to the job of working with them and, thus, little did get done.

I said it before, and I'll say it again...

Barack Obama was the most unqualified person to assume the Presidency in modern times...

And it shows...

He spent two years as a US senator before he started running for the Presidency, prior to that he had spent two years as state senator from Illinois...

(Some folks like to compare Obama to Jack Kennedy, but JFK spent four years in the House and 10 years in the Senate before he was nominated in 1960...)

In addition to having no knowledge of "the workings of Washington" having never served as a Governor, or even as a "Big City Mayor" he had no experience or understanding of how an "Executive" interacts with a "legislature"...

And he has a clear distaste for the rough and tumble of interpersonal political engagement that makes for a successful Presidency...

Barack Obama loves the ambience of the Presidency, but he detests the nuts and bolts nittty gritty part of the job that makes one a successful President...

[dales]

Barack Obama loves the ambience of the Presidency, but he detests the nuts and bolts nittty gritty part of the job that makes one a successful President...

Jim, I would take the current POTUS over either Trump or Hillary.

Talk about being stuck betwixt a rock and a hard on.

[Lord Jim]

Jim, I would take the current POTUS over either Trump or Hillary.

I would not...

I would take Hillary over Obama or Trump...

On domestic policy it's probably a wash between the two of them, but on foreign policy and defense I expect a stronger and more effective performance from Hillary then we have gotten from the current incumbent. Less naval gazing and thumb sucking and more affirmative action.

Internationally, we currently have a President who is neither respected nor feared by the leadership of any country on the planet, friend or foe. This is a terrible situation; the sooner he is gone the better.

[Bicycle Bill]

Obama likes to look at boats?

Less naval gazing and thumb sucking and more affirmative action.

-"BB"-

[BoSoxGal]

Internationally, we currently have a President who is neither respected nor feared by the leadership of any country on the planet, friend or foe. This is a terrible situation; the sooner he is gone the better.

Obama isn't respected by any country on the planet? What a fucking stupid statement. He only gets applause and standing ovations from UK parliament, Canadian parliament, etc. and is lauded by citizens of friend and foe nations around the world. There are plenty of world leaders who speak highly of him.

Seriously stupid and entirely baseless assertion, LJ. Hint: your opinion on the point isn't fact.