How big a failure is Obama's presidency?

Interesting. So if the police catch a serial killer three years after his spree, it doesn't matter? They shouldn't even bother trying to catch him, or prosecuting him, because ... sports metaphor?

Osama Bin Laden and terrorism was not a law enforcement issue.

The part of Al Queda that Bin Laden had led by 2011 had changed radically and he was arguably mainly a bystander by then.

But

If you want to stick with the serial killer comparison.

Ever heard of "Cold Case"?

If some murders occurr and then the murderer goes inactive, does the cases still get the same level of resources 10 years later?

Agreed. I'm glad he's dead and the President deserves credit for making that call. And before anyone objects I'll remind you that two previous presidents had the opportunity to get him and didn't.

Get back to me if Obama gets impeached. Until then you guys are just blowing smoke.

Are we talking about the same Bill Clinton that signed into law NAFTA, DOMA, welfare reform and don't ask don't tell? THAT Bill Clinton? You have a very funny definition of conservative.

Simple disagreement doesn't, no.

You are aware that there has been record obstruction in appointees, right? Never before in the history of the US has Congress stopped more of an administration's attempts to place candidates to actually run the government? That the ACA was the midrange option - the damn near everyone on the left wanted single payer, not individual mandate which was invented by Republican think tanks and was part of Newt Gingrich's attempt to solve the healthcare problem. It instead became the clarion call of hatred.

For someone who's pretty damn centrist when it comes to economic policy, the level of vitriol against Obama is amazing.

Hell, Charlie Crist started the Obama presidency a republican. He left explicitly because he saw too much racism in the GOP. Why did he see it so vividly? He was viciously attacked for hugging Obama.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/charlie-crist-racism-republicans-obama

As far as your comments on my age, yes, I remember Clinton. I remember Reagan too. You aren't a very good judge of character if you think I'm in my 20s.

I voted GOP for Bush 41, Dole, Bush 43, Bush 43, and McCain. I've voted for a Democrat for POTUS a grand total of 1 time, the last election with Obama, because it had become glaringly obvious how the GOP was pandering to the worst elements of society, and Romney - who actually I mentioned here in 2006 might make a good President - showed how little of a spine he had showing his 'true conservative' (read: brain-dead ignorance) beliefs, while attempting to get the Know Nothings to vote for him in the Primary. That combined with my belief on the evils of 'creative destruction' (amusingly originally a communist term) and how out of touch Romney turned out to be that Obama was actually the better candidate to try to keep jobs here and support the middle class. He didn't succeed there, but he was better than the alternative.

At this point I see whether you can recognize how ridiculously corrupt the GOP is in its current incarnation a basic intelligence test. Money is free speech. Corporations are people. Despite the vast amount of wealth draining from the middle class to the upper 1%, it is the 'job creators' (lol) that are the true victims in all this due to class hatred.

It's a basic intelllience test. And lots of people fail that one.

The GOP impeached Clinton and his poll numbers went up. The last thing they are going to do is make him sympathetic.

I'd say they are about the same. Obama kept Gates on, a Republican, as secretary of the defense. His healthcare law was centrist, taking large elements from the Heritage Foundation think tank, Gingrich, and Mitt Romney's work in Mass. He's kept drug policy the same, despite calls from the left to enter into the Federal decriminalization era, he brought the surveillance state further into being, slammed whistle blowers, and even targeted the supposedly liberal media. He instituted economic policies which surged stock prices and led to record corporate profits, all while they downsized their workforce. Oh, and his AG started a new era where financial institutions face no criminal sanctions for the most aggregious penalties - not even Reagan would have let that happen.

Keeping Republicans on as Secretary's of Defense actually shows how little President Obama cared about the military.

Traditionally, you have a member of the opposition as part of your cabinet....in an area you care little about where they can have little or no influence.

And saying Obamacare was modeled after Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusettes means little because things that work on a small scale in a small, homogenous state do NOT necessarily work on the nation as a whole.

It is like saying the plays that work well for a Pop Warner (PeeWee) football team would inevitably work well for an NFL franchise...

The democrats held up a great many of Bush's appointees. The republicans simply one upped them when the roles were reversed.

No it was the call of "we are no longer led by Newt Gingrich nor are most of those republicans even serving anymore." Both Democrats and Republicans have changed their positions in the last twenty years. Do you shit on the democrats for their changes on gay rights and the fact they have have pretty much purged ever pro-life and pro-coal politician out of their party?

So was the vitrial against Bush and Clinton. The democrats didn't even want to admit that Bush was a legitimate President and the Republicans started an investigation on Clinton that went from whitewater to a blow job. When I question your age it's because I can't see how you can remember all this and still think Obama had it worse than anyone else.

I live in Florida and I remember the 2010 republican primary very well. Charlie left the republican party because he saw that he was going lose his primary. That "hug" was Charlie accepting the Obama stimulus which the republican base was against. He also raised fees while in office and vetoed an education bill that he had promised he would sign. That book was revionist history and the voters saw through that when they voted against him twice in the last two elections. In fact Charlie has now lost as a republican,independent and democrat. Maybe he'll go for libertarian next.

By the way his opponent in the republican primary in 2010 that he couldn't stand to lose to was hispanic. If the party was racist, why didn't they choose the very white Charlie Crist over the Cuban Marco Rubio?

As it has been for decades.

Corporations DO employ people.

You do realize that job creators are not just the one percent right?

And you know this based on what?

Gruber said the trick with Romneycare was that they figured out how to trick the federal government out of $700 million a year.

I don't see Obama being constantly denigrated as "dumb" like Bush was despite ample opportunity (57 states anyone?).

I don't see members of Congress claiming that "Obama lied, people died".

For starters.

On Crist's statement in the link Demiurge provided in his post.

He said it on a comedy show that parodies politicians. If he really believed it, he's an idiot. I don't think there are any Republicans who wouldn't hug Condi Rice or Charles Barkley. Hugging Obama? It's right up there with hugging Fidel Castro, Manuel Ortega, or Hugo Chavez.

Mia Love, Susanna Martinez,Marco Rubio, Herman Cain,Ben Carson,Clarence Thomas, Niki Haley, Bobby Jindal....Republicans have no trouble hugging or supporting them and none of them fit the white male mold.

Joe Biden will hug Obama, but only because he thinks Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." For some reason he didn't think Bill Cosby fit that bill, so what did Biden know and when did he know it?

Statements like the article in the OP fascinate me, because it's the equivalent of pulling a pie out of the oven, while it's still in the process of baking, and demanding the baker be held accountable for the failure. There are always these grand pronouncements of "he failed" or "they failed" that just have no intellectual or rational weight. It's entirely emotional; defeatist, even. It's the journalistic equivalent of opening a fully stocked refrigerator and declaring that there's nothing to eat. Sure you can say it, but just because you believe it doesn't mean others can't find something of value there.

Maybe, but your description of Massachusetts is pretty off. It's the 14th largest state by population -- what's the cut-off between large and small? As for homogeneity, 1 in 7 are foreign born, and while the population was 95% non-hispanic white in 1970, by 2010 that was less than 75%. Sure, not as diverse as some states, but rapidly changing populations are often more complex than stable but more diverse populations.

At any rate, I question your larger point. IIRC, people argued before federal welfare reform that it had worked in Wisconsin, implying that a state similar to Massachusetts (though smaller and whiter) could serve well as a test lab. Were they wrong about that?

A couple of points in this thread:

. I agree that the shitshow last year with the government shutdown ended my faith in the GOP as a legitimate political force. It's clear that they'll burn the house down if it'll make them king of the ashes.

. I don't think Obama is more conservative than Clinton, not in the way they governed as president, and most definitely not in their core political stances.

. I don't see how the vitriolic opposition to Obama can be chalked up to racism. I think it has more to do with his platform.

As the article highlights, Obama came into office with big plans for expanding the role of government. I think it was O’Reilly that referred to him as “LBJ on steroids.” The GOP from Reagan to Bush 43 had spent three decades trying to dismantle the Great Society that they had always resisted. And then in 2008, Obama swept into office with a decisively Leftist agenda and a Democratic majority to make it happen. It makes sense to me that the Right reacted the way they did. In 2004, pundits were musing of a "permanent Republican majority" a la the New Deal coalition, and then four short years later their vision of America lay in shambles. In 2008, everyone expected Obama to be next FDR, and so did the GOP, which for them was a nightmare scenario.

All the same, six years later they’ve got their majority back and Obama’s agenda almost completely neutered. It’s hard to argue they went about things the wrong way, from their perspective.

That being said, it's worth exploring just how horrible of a politician Obama has been, regardless of the intensity of his opposition. Obama is great on stage, but behind the scenes he has consistently failed to nurture relationships and work the machinery on Capitol Hill in order to make things happen. He's been overly idealistic and not nearly ruthless enough for the job.

With so much political failure and uncertainty, and the strong possibility that the GOP will win the White House in ’16, it’s hard for me to have any faith in the US government at all.

That's what she said!

I mean it's like Harry Reid said, he doesn't have that negro dialect.

Obama has actually accomplished the one thing I have wanted to see. He shined a bright light on existing racism and has caused a continual Conservative meltdown since he got into office. I never expected him to live up to the grand change or make the us into some Utopia. I never expected him to bring the US job market and manufacturing back to the good old days. I never expected universal health care. I never expected the US to get out of the warmongering funding the MIC and certain companies corrupt contracting. That lack of expectation is not because he is Obama either, it is because he is a president. The greed of the rich is the reason for a lot of our problems, and the rich own every elected federal person and their appointees.

Considering our last few presidents Obama is pretty neutral. However, the results of any presidency are not seen for many years due to their long term effects on society. Who knows, maybe a decade from now Obamacare will be like social security and people will like it. It might crash the horrible for profit insurance industry and we could get something better out of it prompting people in the future to wonder why we ever put up with the death panels and denial of care from a bunch of accountants looking to pay off their investors rather than help the sick thedy were contracted to help? The most likely thing is we will probably be tooling along with a bunch of corrupt politicians in pretty much the same way we do today.

^Awfully cynical.

Cynicism and disillusionment is no substitute for actual debate and analysis.

Our modern political system being joined at the hip with our infotainment media isn't conducive to anyone, either. When the opposition party considers compromise to be your abdication of presidential power, what do you do? When millions of people get their news from biased news sources pretending to be journalists, how do you fight it? Our nation has fallen victim to rote partisanship, and at this point there's little to be done unless one has piles of money and influence, and in such a case, one likes things as they are.

To put it another way, Obama could advocate every policy of the GOP, and they would still call him a dictator, Emperor, Hitler, the Antichrist, a socialist, and a Muslim. The party exists to make sure the party continues existing. The Democratic party won't be any better, because the same will apply to any future Republican president. It's about petty political attacks, and smokescreen bullshit, and people will continue to pick sides as if it matters. This isn't about guiding the course of a nation, it's about bread and circuses, and people eat it up.

Now, I realize there are individual policies and issues that each party embraces, but those ideas aren't exclusive to those individual parties, they've merely been co-opted. We can have new parties, or better yet, just individuals with their own ideas on how to properly govern our country, but we don't get that because politics are like sports: nearly everyone has a favorite team, and by god the quarterback for that team could eat a live puppy on national television, and that team's fans will defend the action to the death. The system is self-perpetuating as long as people seek only to nod their heads and go with who they consider the "winning" team.

Regardless of his actual policies, I don't blame Obama for doing what he's done, because whether one agrees with his political issues themselves, at least he's trying to get shit done in a congress that has no interest in anything other than themselves.

But he's doing the thing that he's spent six years saying he wouldn't do because he's not a dictator. Well, that logic seems to have gone right out the window. The Constitution invests all power over naturalization policies with the Congress in Article I, and none with the President. As Ted Cruz just said, "A presidential temper tantrum is not a rational response." People also noted that it was the most racist speech since Woodrow Wilson, and perhaps we need to debate whether those fruit pickers can stay, and whether 'fruit picker' is even an ethnicity.

So, regardless of WHAT Obama wants to do, even I assume if you disagree with it strongly and think it is bad for the country, you're happy he is at least "TRYING TO GET SHIT DONE".

That is worse than the guy up threads staggering cynicism. It assumes ANY action is better than none which is patently ridiculous.

No, what I'm saying is that I'm glad he's tired of Congress' mutual masturbation party, and is trying to forge ahead and do what he thinks is right, and I'm okay with that as long as it's constitutional. He knows he won't get compromise. The GOP can talk all day about cooperation, but anyone who has paid attention knows it's bullshit. There is no cooperation because that would mean giving in to the enemy, and gods forbid you agree with something the guy on the other side of the aisle agrees with, because that means you're not an all-in-for-the-winning-team super patriot!

Obama changed naturalization laws? Cool, so how quick is it now, 3 years instead of 5? Where's the press coverage for this new citizenship law?

George W Bush was for amnesty and was equally frustrated with Congress for inaction, but like pre-tantrum Obama, realized that the President can't Constitutionally do much of anything on immigration without Congress. Perhaps the only good part of Obama's plan is that all the fruit pickers with criminal backgrounds will now have to self-deport, because Obama won't allow them here.

Under lots of legal precedents going back to the early days of the Republic, immigration and naturalization are hand-in-hand and the powers are considered the same under Article I. We even had an immigration and naturalization service commonly called the INS. All the President is supposed to do is enforce the laws as written - by Congress.

@gturner, which part of the law did he change? You seem to be back pedaling from your original claim that he changed our naturalization laws.