How had the Obama Administration measured up so far

What do you think of the Obama Ad.?

  • Much worse than expected -- apocalapse

    Votes: 8 38.1%
  • Worse than expected

    Votes: 3 14.3%
  • As expected

    Votes: 7 33.3%
  • Better than expected

    Votes: 3 14.3%
  • Created utopia

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    21
Thought the inexperienced neighborhood disorganizer would have a rough going but he's far exceeded my wildest expectations. So in other words he's doing a great job, a really really great job.
 
His ability to piss off/scare the shit out of rightwingers is beyond comparison.
 
Looks great so far.

We elected Obama to do two things pass healthcare and fix the economy.

First one: Completed

Second one: Well on the way

Looking great for a second term
 
Looks great so far.

We elected Obama to do two things pass healthcare and fix the economy.

First one: Completed

Second one: Well on the way

Looking great for a second term

Funny, I thought he was elected to pass healthcare reform not just a "healthcare" bill. His insurance industry bailout, written and organized via secretive collusion with the insurance and pharmaceutical industry, is just about the opposite of what his voting base wanted.

His mandate was to get out of our two ongoing foreign occupations (not only still ongoing, but massively escalating in Afghanistan), pass a public option (fail), restore the rule of law (massive fail), institute progressive taxation (so far, fail), close Guantanamo Bay and work out a legal means of dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism (embarrassing fail), and usher in a new era of transparency and representative government replacing the old order of corporate and lobbyist control over major political decisions (the most ridiculously epic fail of them all).

I expected him to be a C or C- like Clinton, which would have at least had him among the top tier of modern American presidents. Instead, especially after his blatant and unremitting lies regarding his personal axing of the public option while publicly feigning to support it and reversal on the most fundamental of American laws and due process, he's a big fat F and every bit as bad as Reagan or Bush. Like them, I think you're probably right that he'll have a second term, but that in no way speaks to his quality, competency, or adherence to the Constitution.
 
It's what i expected basically. However,his Health Care debacle forces me to vote that he's been worse than expected. He's close to being much worse than expected but not there yet. I guess we'll see.
 
It's been over a year now

as expected. Obama was inexperienced and his team knew he just barely won the primary and only won the general because he was not Bush-lite. Obama has really done what I'd have expected anyone to have done. No profile in courage yet. If he gets this health care thing established and takes the credit/blame come 2010, he will get my respect and vote. I want to see more principles and balls.
 
I knew it was gonna be bad but even I didn't expect it to be this bad..
 
Looks great so far.

We elected Obama to do two things pass healthcare and fix the economy.

First one: Completed

Second one: Well on the way

Looking great for a second term

Partly, but he gets the credit for saving the economy, although I would've thought anyone in his office would have done the very same things...protests to the contrary. There were very few options--America;s and Obama's hands were tied. The only other option was to watch the system fall apart.

:eusa_whistle:
 
Thought the inexperienced neighborhood disorganizer would have a rough going but he's far exceeded my wildest expectations. So in other words he's doing a great job, a really really great job.

Yes...if you like bribery, arm-twisting, thuggery, intimidation, and criminal behavior...then he's exceeded your wildest expectations.
 
Looks great so far.

We elected Obama to do two things pass healthcare and fix the economy.

First one: Completed

Second one: Well on the way

Looking great for a second term

Partly, but he gets the credit for saving the economy, although I would've thought anyone in his office would have done the very same things...protests to the contrary. There were very few options--America;s and Obama's hands were tied. The only other option was to watch the system fall apart.

:eusa_whistle:

He took reponsibility...but the only thing that helped the economy was the delay in implementing his fucked up programs.
 
I knew it was gonna be bad but even I didn't expect it to be this bad..

"reality check in aisle 1"

I'm positive that WillowTree opposes Obama for the wrong reasons on close to 100% of the issues, but seriously now... His presidency is radically worse than almost anyone could have predicted. All politicians fail to live up to their campaign promises, but most at least try to some degree to live up to them and pass the policies they advocated even if extenuating circumstances interfere or lead to their eventual failure.

Obama just lied, lied, lied all throughout the campaign and all throughout the presidency, utilizing Orwellian doublespeak that equals if not surpasses Bush for the massive divergence between what he says he's doing and what's he's actually doing. On almost every issue of major significance, he's doing almost exactly the literal direct opposite of what he said he'd do.

Really, check this out:

NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option

For months I've been reporting in The Huffington Post that President Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation. (See here, here and here). I've been increasingly frustrated that except for an initial story last August in the New York Times, no major media outlet has picked up this important story and investigated further.

Hopefully, that's changing. On Monday, Ed Shultz interviewed New York Times Washington reporter David Kirkpatrick on his MSNBC TV show, and Kirkpatrick confirmed the existence of the deal. Shultz quoted Chip Kahn, chief lobbyist for the for-profit hospital industry on Kahn's confidence that the White House would honor the no public option deal, and Kirkpatrick responded:


"That's a lobbyist for the hospital industry and he's talking about the hospital industry's specific deal with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee and, yeah, I think the hospital industry's got a deal here. There really were only two deals, meaning quid pro quo handshake deals on both sides, one with the hospitals and the other with the drug industry. And I think what you're interested in is that in the background of these deals was the presumption, shared on behalf of the lobbyists on the one side and the White House on the other, that the public option was not going to be in the final product."

Kirkpatrick also acknowledged that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina had confirmed the existence of the deal.

This should be big news. Even while President Obama was saying that he thought a public option was a good idea and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare plan would include one, he had promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there would be no public option in the final bill.


Industry interests are not in their "twilight"

Obama repeatedly railed against the Washington practice of crafting bills by negotiating in secret with lobbyists and industry interests, and his whole I'll-put-these-negotations-on-C-SPAN promise was specifically designed, he said, to prevent a health care bill from being negotiated based on secret deals with the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

But that's exactly how he ended up negotiating this bill -- using the exact secret processes that he railed against and which he swore he would banish. It was only because The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim uncovered the secret memo-deal the White House had entered into with PhRMA -- a deal they had publicly denied until then and until PhRMA demanded they publicly affirm it -- did we know that the administration had agreed to oppose drug re-importation and bulk price negotiations, measures Obama (and the Democrats generally) repeatedly promised to enact. Indeed, when it came time to vote on drug re-importation, the administration concocted false "safety concerns" about re-importation in order to whip against Byron Dorgan's re-importation amendment, rather than admit that they really opposed it because they secretly promised they would to PhRMA, which hates drug re-importation because it lowers prices. And it was only two days ago that we finally had confirmed what (at least to me) was obvious all along: namely, the White House had agreed in secret with health care industry representatives that there would be no public option in a final bill, even as the President publicly feigned support for it and pretended to be fighting for it.

In other words, this bill was negotiated using the standard, secret, sleazy Beltway lobbyist/industry practices that candidate Obama frequently condemned and vowed to defeat. And these industries extracted such huge benefits as a result of these secret deals -- a bill shaped to their liking and profit objectives -- that they are essentially in favor of it.


The Moment

Obama's victory was achieved because his team played the old game brilliantly. Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, his team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs), and the insurance industry ((let's NOT ignore the duplicity in this) with the promise that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in "bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits." Obama didn't "push back on the undue influence of special interests," as he said today. He bought them off. And the price he paid should make us all wonder: how much reform can this administration -- and this Nation -- afford?

By the way, it should be no surprise the insurance industry loves this bill as a former executive of Wellpoint, one of the nation's largest private insurance companies, was the primary author of the Senate bill from which the final bill was derived. We actually had the insurance companies writing the bailout legislation being passed off as industry reform.

For far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, the system has been rigged against everyday Americans by the lobbyists that Wall Street uses to get its way.

Think about it. The top mortgage lenders spend $185 million lobbying Congress, and we wonder why Washington looked the other way when they were tricking families into buying homes they couldn't afford. Drug and insurance companies spend $1 billion on lobbying, and we're surprised that our health care premiums, and co-pays, and the cost of prescription drugs goes up year after year after year. The big oil companies play the same game, and we wonder how they're making record profits at a time when you're paying close to $4 a gallon for gas.

The system is broken...

I know there's been some talk about Rocky Balboa over the last couple days. And we all love Rocky. But Rocky was fiction. And so is the idea that someone can fight for working people and at the same time, embrace the broken system in Washington, where corporate lobbyists use their clout to shape laws to their liking. **bells and whistles and alarms**

We need to challenge the system on behalf of America's workers. And if we're not willing to take up that fight, then real change -- change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans -- will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.

--Barack Obama

“We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who [is] making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

--Barack Obama

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpghvx63imc&feature=PlayList&p=F8CD25F92BFC4A7F&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=10]YouTube - Obama Promising Televised Healthcare Negotiations[/ame]

I just don't see how any rational person can continue to consider Obama's credibility to be any better than Mark Sanford's or Richard Nixon's. How do smart, informed people justify ever believing another word out of such a boldly lying liar's mouth?
 
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Thought the inexperienced neighborhood disorganizer would have a rough going but he's far exceeded my wildest expectations. So in other words he's doing a great job, a really really great job.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y]YouTube - Twilight Zone intro.[/ame]
 
Utter disaster. He is a lot worse than I thought he would be.
 
Utter disaster. He is a lot worse than I thought he would be.

I'll never understand that position. How could ANY THINKING HUMAN BEING NOT REALIZE THE CATASTROPHE OF ELECTING A MARXIST AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES... In a RECESSION, nonetheless...

But you just stand by... He hasn't even BEGUN to wreck the US.

They're desperate now... and their marginal means to pass that Catastrophic HC Bill is proof of their concern. MASSIVE Majorities in BOTH houses of the Legislature and they had to resort to illicit parlamentary means to get THAT DONE...

They realize that November is the end of the Line and will now go to work to cram as much subversive legislation down range as is humanly possible.
 
Utter disaster. He is a lot worse than I thought he would be.

I'll never understand that position. How could ANY THINKING HUMAN BEING NOT REALIZE THE CATASTROPHE OF ELECTING A MARXIST AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES... In a RECESSION, nonetheless...

But you just stand by... He hasn't even BEGUN to wreck the US.

They're desperate now... and their marginal means to pass that Catastrophic HC Bill is proof of their concern. MASSIVE Majorities in BOTH houses of the Legislature and they had to resort to illicit parlamentary means to get THAT DONE...

They realize that November is the end of the Line and will now go to work to cram as much subversive legislation down range as is humanly possible.

Yes...more to come....Nancy Pelosi bragged as much....

Byron York writing in The Examiner:

"If you have any doubt that the Democratic leadership of the House views passing the current health care reform bill as the beginning, not the end, of the process of creating a national government health care system, just note what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of bloggers on Monday. "My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive," Pelosi said, according to an account by Washington Post reform advocate Ezra Klein. "We won that fight, and once we kick through this door, there'll be more legislation to follow."

Pelosi brags that Obamacare is just the beginning
 

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