Obama is the perfect example of why I don't like following politics.

[TheGame]

I'm bored, so I wanted to make a list of things we voted for:

1. Escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
2. Less gun restrictions
3. Right-wing healthcare reform that extends no government programs, and only benifits the private industry.
4. An extension of the Patriot Act
5. Campaign finance reform that benifits the rich more
6. No Justice for Bush/Cheney breaking international laws
7. No fight against companies that evade tax laws
8. No tax cuts for the middle class
9. Great speeches

10. Increased Spending - (Everyone who actually looks into it knows that 1.2 trillion of the deficit was created by failed policies under republican leadership. But Obama didn't help.)

So anyway, moral of the story is... no matter who you vote for, you'll get the same BS. The system in this country is very broken.

The only thing I can give Obama credit for now, is the same thing I bashed at #1.. he's definently made more progress then the last year in the Afghan war then bush made in his last 5 years.. but we're still just wasting even more money on a war without clear objectives.

Thoughts?

[Vampyr]

I pretty much quite caring about politics a while back or bothering to keep up with anything going on. I just drop out of any conversations that start going down that path. Everyone already has their minds made up.

It's too stressful and there's nothing I can really do about it. I'll just continue voting for whoever supports the social concerns that I have.

[Xantar]

Ok, it's been a hard day at work, so I'll bite.

1. Escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Actually, just Afghanistan. Iraq is winding down. And Obama had always campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan. Besides,

2. Less gun restrictions

How so? Because the Supreme Court ruled in a DC court case that the 2nd Amendment gives an individual right to bear arms? That wasn't Obama's doing.

3. Right-wing healthcare reform that extends no government programs, and only benifits the private industry.

I'm not sure what other alternative you wanted, but pretty much no other health care reform plan was going to pass Congress. I'll try to break it down, but understand that I'm going to gloss over a whole lot of stuff here.

Do you like the fact that insurance companies deny coverage to people for pre-existing conditions? Do you want to prevent them from doing that? Well, the fact is covering people for pre-existing conditions DOES cost more (many insurance companies abuse the policy, but that doesn't mean the basic economic fact is untrue). So if you force companies to take people with pre-existing conditions, they will raise premiums.

How do you prevent that? You expand the pool of insured people and get as many healthy people insured as possible so that their premiums cover sicker people. The best way to do that is by a mandate.

But what if you mandate coverage for people who can't afford it? That's why you now have subsidies for people earning below a certain amount.

Now if you don't want to benefit the insurance industry at all, then you could just institute Single Payer at one fell swoop. But that was never going to pass Congress, and the inconvenient fact many liberals ignore is that doing such a thing would put tens upon thousands of people out of work. Instituting something that sudden just isn't a good idea. It took Canada quite a long time to develop their health care system.

4. An extension of the Patriot Act

Is it possible that there are some parts of the USA PATRIOT Act that are actually good for fighting terrorism and that the best thing to do is not to scrap it altogether but to amend it? I don't actually know the answer to that question for sure, but Obama's argument seemed to be that we didn't need to throw out all the useful stuff just because there was potential for abuse.

5. Campaign finance reform that benifits the rich more

How so? Unless you're talking about the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United case. But again, that's something Obama had no control over.

6. No Justice for Bush/Cheney breaking international laws

Besides the fact that there's no political will for it, I think you should keep in mind that it's only been a year since Bush and Cheney left office. But mostly, I would say that the American public just isn't interested in going after Cheney for any crimes he may have committed in office. Obama is not the king.

7. No fight against companies that evade tax laws

Not true. I work for a tax law firm. We are getting a lot of work right now because the IRS is actively going after foreign bank accounts. It has hired hundreds to thousands of investigators (accountants, lawyers, that kind of thing) in order enforce taxes. This isn't covered by the media, but any tax professional who follows what's going on can see it.

8. No tax cuts for the middle class

Yeah there was. I could see it in my own paycheck.

9. Great speeches

10. Increased Spending - (Everyone who actually looks into it knows that 1.2 trillion of the deficit was created by failed policies under republican leadership. But Obama didn't help.)

Depends on the time frame you're looking at. In this one year, it's true that Obama increased the deficit. Over the next five years will the deficit go up or down? And will it have changed more or less than it would have if Obama had done nothing? We just don't know that yet. There are ways for very smart economists to figure that out, but they don't have the data yet.

You have to keep two things in mind about Obama:

1. He's a former community organizer and
2. He's a politician.

#1 means that he will almost never talk tough because he is not interested in bashing people. He's interested in getting results. Right now, his best asset is the American public views him as reasonable, moderate, and trying to be bipartisan (this isn't just my opinion. The polls bear this out). If you watch him carefully, you will see that he likes to say a lot of stuff about how he hopes to be bipartisan while at the same time not raising too much of a fuss when his policies are voted on in Congress along strictly partisan lines.

Which brings us to #2. Obama is a politician which means you cannot take everything he says at face value. It's not so much that he lies (although sometimes he will be misleading) as that he only says things that aren't going to get him in trouble with the media. Take the bipartisanship talk again. A lot of liberals like to bash him because they don't understand why he would continue to try to seek bipartisan support for his programs when it's clear Republicans will never go along. The thing is the moment Obama says, "All right, you Republicans are just being silly obstructionists. I'm going without you" the media would blare headlines saying, "Obama gets tough!" or "He's being partisan all of a sudden! What happened to change we can believe in?"

If you haven't been turned off politics already, I encourage you to pay very close attention to Obama. By that I mean watch his favored legislation moving around at the committee level. Check out the little changes in rules and regulations at various agencies he's implementing. Or if you're too busy for that, find some good bloggers who do that sort of thing and read from them. I think what you'll find is that Obama is definitely making very huge changes in the country in ways that liberal Democrats will like and Republicans will not like (whether conservatives will like it too depends on your definition of conservative).

[TheGame]

I made a reply yesterday.. but my computer decided to freeze, and I wasn't up to typing it all back out. Actually I'm still not up to it, but I'ma quickly share my thoughts on things.

Originally Posted by Xantar

Actually, just Afghanistan. Iraq is winding down. And Obama had always campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan. Besides,

That's true.

How so? Because the Supreme Court ruled in a DC court case that the 2nd Amendment gives an individual right to bear arms? That wasn't Obama's doing.

Also true. And of course, Obama supports this decision. But across the country, gun laws in general have become a lot looser since Obama has become president.. And he hasn't offered even a word of criticism for it. Granted, the state law changes may just be put in place to bait a reaction from Obama.

I'm not sure what other alternative you wanted, but pretty much no other health care reform plan was going to pass Congress. I'll try to break it down, but understand that I'm going to gloss over a whole lot of stuff here.

Do you like the fact that insurance companies deny coverage to people for pre-existing conditions? Do you want to prevent them from doing that? Well, the fact is covering people for pre-existing conditions DOES cost more (many insurance companies abuse the policy, but that doesn't mean the basic economic fact is untrue). So if you force companies to take people with pre-existing conditions, they will raise premiums.

How do you prevent that? You expand the pool of insured people and get as many healthy people insured as possible so that their premiums cover sicker people. The best way to do that is by a mandate.

But what if you mandate coverage for people who can't afford it? That's why you now have subsidies for people earning below a certain amount.

Now if you don't want to benefit the insurance industry at all, then you could just institute Single Payer at one fell swoop. But that was never going to pass Congress, and the inconvenient fact many liberals ignore is that doing such a thing would put tens upon thousands of people out of work. Instituting something that sudden just isn't a good idea. It took Canada quite a long time to develop their health care system.

I see your point, however I'd prefer that the goverment make their own option for healthcare that has to adhere to these rules, instead of trying to requlate the massive medical insurance industry. So when the insurance industry finds loop holes to raise prices, or when they go bankrupt, or when their levels of care get worse.. they can only blame themselves and not government regulation.

Canadate Obama would have agreed with me. President Obama, however, isn't even willing to fight for it. It wasn't even part of the discussion with the republicans last week.

But that's a whole different debate.

Is it possible that there are some parts of the USA PATRIOT Act that are actually good for fighting terrorism and that the best thing to do is not to scrap it altogether but to amend it? I don't actually know the answer to that question for sure, but Obama's argument seemed to be that we didn't need to throw out all the useful stuff just because there was potential for abuse.

Candidate Obama was very clear in his dislike of the Patriot Act. This is just an example of him changing his opinion.. changing it to the more politically unpopular opinion at that.

How so? Unless you're talking about the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United case. But again, that's something Obama had no control over.

So are you saying that the president has no control over campaign finance reform? He's clearly in a position where he can fight that ruling if he wanted to, but the problem is that he doesn't want to. He has said he wants to fight, but after that ruling by the supreme court, nothing has been done whatsoever.

Besides the fact that there's no political will for it, I think you should keep in mind that it's only been a year since Bush and Cheney left office. But mostly, I would say that the American public just isn't interested in going after Cheney for any crimes he may have committed in office. Obama is not the king.

I agree that Obama is not the king, and I agree that there was no political will to do it.. but I strongly disagree when you say the American public isn't interested in going after the guys who destroyed the reputation of America.

And this is an example of Obama waffling and being weak on a subject. He clearly said that he thinks torture is illegal as a candidate, and banned it as president. But he's unwilling to acknowledge that the previous administration broke the law. So when the next president comes, if they decide to open up another off-shore prison and torture people, it's now legitamate and simply a "difference of opinion" from Obama, and not illegal.

Not true. I work for a tax law firm. We are getting a lot of work right now because the IRS is actively going after foreign bank accounts. It has hired hundreds to thousands of investigators (accountants, lawyers, that kind of thing) in order enforce taxes. This isn't covered by the media, but any tax professional who follows what's going on can see it.

You're right, this isn't covered by the US media.

Yeah there was. I could see it in my own paycheck.

Federal or State? I haven't seen it in mine. Most news reports claim that there hasn't been a cut. What pay range is considered to be middle class these days?

Depends on the time frame you're looking at. In this one year, it's true that Obama increased the deficit. Over the next five years will the deficit go up or down? And will it have changed more or less than it would have if Obama had done nothing? We just don't know that yet. There are ways for very smart economists to figure that out, but they don't have the data yet.

I agree. We'll see what happens.

And it has changed more then if Obama had done nothing. 1.2 Trillion was the base deficit if no changes were made. I don't see Escalating the war in Afghanistan as being a smart move when it comes to the deficit.

#1 means that he will almost never talk tough because he is not interested in bashing people. He's interested in getting results.

The problem is bashing people and threatining their political career is what gets results. I personally think it'd have served him better to come out guns blazing out of the gate. But I guess that's another thing that time will tell. But a year after the healthcare debate started, for example... we now see what kind of results "playing nice" yeilds. I think things would have been much better if he just rammed it through to start, and didn't waste his time legitimizing the republican party.

I mean, look at the stimulus package... Obama rammed that through, republicans hated it and tried to paint it as something it wasn't. Even though it adds less then 100 billion to the yearly deficit, we get to hear the numbers 900 billion, and 1 trillion over 10 years over and over. Even though it's 10 year cost is less then the 1.2 trillion YEARLY problem that was created under republican leadership. But you're never going to hear that.

But.. over the last 3 months people have been coming out and saying that the stimulus package is working. Democrats and Republicans.

I want to go back and say that Obama is probably playing smart politics.. And he's going to use his bipartanship to his advantage come 2012.. but when I look at his approval ratings right now, I really can't say that what he's doing is working.

[Xantar]

Also true. And of course, Obama supports this decision. But across the country, gun laws in general have become a lot looser since Obama has become president.. And he hasn't offered even a word of criticism for it. Granted, the state law changes may just be put in place to bait a reaction from Obama.

It is true that Obama said the Supreme Court reached the correct decision. Even I think the Supreme Court decision was correct, and I'm not a professor of Constitutional law like Obama was. I think the second amendment is outdated and needs some rethinking, but in the meantime, it is the law of the land.

I see your point, however I'd prefer that the goverment make their own option for healthcare that has to adhere to these rules, instead of trying to requlate the massive medical insurance industry. So when the insurance industry finds loop holes to raise prices, or when they go bankrupt, or when their levels of care get worse.. they can only blame themselves and not government regulation.

Canadate Obama would have agreed with me. President Obama, however, isn't even willing to fight for it. It wasn't even part of the discussion with the republicans last week.

But that's a whole different debate.

No, it isn't a whole different debate. The public option, as you may know, passed the House of Representatives but did not pass the Senate. You needed 60 senators to vote for the public option, and you didn't have 60 senators who supported it. Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and Joe Lieberman all opposed it along with all 40 Republicans. Evan Bayh was also pretty lukewarm about it. And even if you could have convinced Lincoln, Nelson, and Bayh to go along, there was no way Lieberman was going to change his mind. He knows full well that he's dead at the next election, so he's just going to do whatever he wants. There was no way for Obama or anybody to force him to do anything. Process matters, and if you want Obama to do something, you have to count how many votes he's going to get in favor of it from the Congress. Nobody has ever shown me which 60 senators could be realistically persuaded to vote for it.

Health care reform is not going to be done in one bill. Medicare and Social Security were very small programs when they were first created. In fact, at the time that FDR signed Social Security into law, he was accused of being a corporate sellout because it was such a small pittance compared to what people wanted. But what he understood was that these kinds of programs grow and expand over. The same thing is going to happen with health care reform. We will come back to the issue later, but the important thing to do now is get universal coverage for everyone. Once the public has gotten used to the idea that everybody should be covered, then they can move on to the debate over the best way to do it. There's a reason why insurance companies are fighting health care reform so hard. They know what's going to happen over the next few decades once the bill passes and Obama signs it into law.

Also, I'm tired of people whining that Obama doesn't "fight for" their issues. Nobody has ever been able to explain to me what it looks like when a President "fights for" something. They seem to think that if Obama just gave lots of speeches advocating for a particular position, senators would come around to seeing things his way. But the problem is senators are huge egotists, and some of them will actually oppose Obama's stated positions just so they can feel powerful. And if Obama just makes a lot of public speeches, the media will get bored of it and stop covering it. In point of fact, every time Obama was at a town hall and got a question about health care, he would give a detailed response and say that he would love it if there was a public option. Did you know that? I'm guessing probably not, and that's because the media doesn't mention it.

Now maybe you're thinking that Obama should bribe, blackmail and threaten senators, but the thing is that kind of stuff happens in secret. I'm sure he's doing his level best, and I'm also sure we won't know about it until long after he's out of office.

So are you saying that the president has no control over campaign finance reform? He's clearly in a position where he can fight that ruling if he wanted to

No, actually he isn't for two reasons:

1. It's Congress that actually has to do something about the Supreme Court ruling, not Obama. And as you know, 60 senators are required to pass anything. Right now, 41 Republicans are pledged to vote against any kind of campaign finance reform law.

2. The Supreme Court ruling said that for the purposes of political campaigns, corporations are to be treated like people and donations to politicians or their campaigns are to be treated like free speech protected under the First Amendment. That leaves very little that anybody can do. The best that anybody can do at this moment is to require that all commercials clearly state who is sponsoring them, and even then that's not going to help very much. If a commercial states that it was sponsored by a group called Americans for Prosperity, would you know if that's a liberal or conservative group?

And this is an example of Obama waffling and being weak on a subject. He clearly said that he thinks torture is illegal as a candidate, and banned it as president. But he's unwilling to acknowledge that the previous administration broke the law. So when the next president comes, if they decide to open up another off-shore prison and torture people, it's now legitamate and simply a "difference of opinion" from Obama, and not illegal.

Well the other problem is that Obama's attorney general seems to be truly independent from Obama himself. This actually seems to be very important to Obama. The attorney general and the Justice Department as a whole is in fact supposed to be an impartial enforcer of the law. So Obama could theoretically tell Eric Holder to open up an investigation into Dick Cheney, but Eric Holder doesn't have to do it if he doesn't want to.

In point of fact, there are ongoing investigations into torture. Those things take time. There was a report released in which John Yoo (one of the authors of the torture memos) was found to have exercised poor judgment rather than being criminally negligent in his duties. You'd think that is a sign that Obama is weak and doesn't want to revisit the past, but actually the conclusion of that report was written by a career attorney at the Justice Department who was around before Obama entered office and will still be around after Obama leaves.

Federal or State? I haven't seen it in mine. Most news reports claim that there hasn't been a cut. What pay range is considered to be middle class these days?

What news reports are you reading? I saw a cut in my Federal taxes because that's what Obama has control over. And it wasn't a huge amount: about $15 per week. But when you multiple that over a year and then multiply that over all the people who earn less than $200,000 per year (which is what the tax cut was for), you get a lot of money from the government. Now personally I don't think that tax cut was necessary because my taxes are so low to begin with that any tax cut just isn't going to be worth that much. But Obama had to do this in order to get support from all 58 Democrats in the Senate (at the time) and a few Republicans.

I mean, look at the stimulus package... Obama rammed that through, republicans hated it and tried to paint it as something it wasn't. Even though it adds less then 100 billion to the yearly deficit, we get to hear the numbers 900 billion, and 1 trillion over 10 years over and over. Even though it's 10 year cost is less then the 1.2 trillion YEARLY problem that was created under republican leadership. But you're never going to hear that.

But.. over the last 3 months people have been coming out and saying that the stimulus package is working. Democrats and Republicans.

I think you're falling victim to selective hindsight here. You may think that Obama rammed the stimulus package through at the beginning of his term, but he actually passed it pretty much the same way he's passing health care reform now. He spent a lot of time saying he wants to be bipartisan. He incorporated a lot of Republican ideas (including tax cuts). And when the stimulus actually passed, a lot of liberals were very upset with him for playing too nice. Paul Krugman of the New York Times, for example, was very critical of the stimulus as not being big enough and for containing too many tax cuts. Visit some liberal blogs in February 2009 and you will see a LOT of criticism of Obama's stimulus package and a lot of people arguing that Obama was playing too nice.

But it passed. You remember it now as a bill passed by Obama and the Democrats. Economists think it helped. And remember that at the time, there weren't 60 Democrats in the Senate to vote for the bill. 3 Republicans had to cross over to vote for it. Reaching across the aisle is necessary sometimes.

but when I look at his approval ratings right now...

Don't. Just don't. Presidential approval ratings right now mean nothing because people by and large aren't paying attention. The electoral campaign hasn't begun yet. It's another 6 months before the mid-term elections. Think about how much can change in 6 months. Remember during the presidential campaign when it looked like Obama was never going to be more than two or three percentage points ahead of McCain? Remember how Obama's lead grew massively in the last two weeks before the election? Presidential approval ratings are the same way: they change a lot over time.

If you're going to ignore my advice and worry about presidential approval ratings, then you should at least consider them in historical context. Every president in modern times experiences a huge drop in his approval ratings during his first year. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated, but it's a true fact for both parties. Obama is actually doing better than Clinton at the same period in his presidency and WAY better than Reagan.

And although I hate making predictions about politics, I'm fairly confident that his approval ratings will go up once health care reform passes. That's because public approval of the government goes down when they see people squabbling and arguing about something they don't have a good understanding of. Once health care reform passes, Obama and the Democrats are going to move on to things like passing jobs bills, financial regulation and possibly some restrictions on bonus payments for financial companies. Those are all very popular. Just think about what's going to happen if Republicans try to defend AIG executives getting million dollar bonuses every year.

So come back to this post in May or June and see if you still feel the same way. I'm sure you'll have other complaints, but you'll find that a lot has changed since then.