Thanks Obama!
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Fixed that for ya.
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The policy wonks really are the right people for the job, but are extremely challenged in actually getting the job. Most of the charismatic types are exactly the wrong kind of people for the job. Frankly, they’re the wrong kind of person for high-level business executive roles where they often gravitate. The best CEOs I’ve met got the job accidentally, when they were the previous CEO’s intelligent buddy (often in a CFO or CMO role), and “inherited” the job when the previous CEO {retired early; went to jail; fled to a country without extradition; left the company high-and-dry for a bigger payday; take your pick}.
Obama has always been a policy wonk, but has just enough charisma to land the job.
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He wasn’t that great as a president… but there’s nothing like being followed by Trump to instantly make you the best ex-President (sorry Jimmy).
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So Tim Cook should be a good CEO…
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I bet at least some across as more terrible than they actually are in private. They’re “terrible” in public because that works well as a part of their primary method now of scaring white people into being afraid of darker people.
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You mean cuz you don’t live in FL, or ?
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The median age of Americans is 38. So even if you liked Carter better it’s no exaggeration to say that for most people in the country, Obama was the best President of their lifetimes.
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Yeah, I’ll give you that - not being a Clinton or Bush is a big plus. Though again that’s a ‘well at least he wasn’t…’. That may be the best we can hope for now!
I was never especially big on Reagan either, though like most past Presidents he looks pretty damn good compared to the guy we have now.
Obama was, and remains, a genuinely inspiring human being in his own right. He had serious flaws, but no more so than any other President who comes to mind.
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Yup.
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This is exactly what I was talking about way up there. He wasn’t a great president - all that ‘Yes we can’ turned out to be ‘no we can’t be bothered’ and he was just as much a corporate whore as the Clintons. But because he meets the bare standards of being charistmatic as hell and not Donald Trump everyone’s treating him like a rock star. He was an adequate, corporate whore, pro-surveilance state, pro bombing the shit out of brown people, anti-gay until he decided to go with the tide (like Bill Clinton), status quo president - but because he came before Trump, and suddenly barely adequate is amazing, everyone’s treating him like a rock star and you guys are deifying him because he looks good in comparison for not being a complete asshat.
He was just another politician who promised way more than he was prepared to deliver and he looks good for not doing too much that was terribly catastrophic. That’s not ‘good’, that’s just good in comparison because our standards are ‘not fucking sheep in public’. It’s entirely possible that a truly good person can’t be elected president, because this country is so terrible, but we should realize that ‘we elected the guy who doesn’t rape puppies to death’ is not ‘we elected a great person’. Because he wasn’t.
Can you name five presidents in the history of the United States who were more effective and less problematic than Obama?
Because if you can’t then he’s still in the 90th percentile, which isn’t bad even if you leave Trump out of the equation entirely.
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No - but you are conflating ‘not terrible’ with ‘great’. He wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t great. He was just the least bad we can hope for because he didn’t fuck sheep in public.
There is a huge difference there, and you guys are deifying him for not being Trump, which, like I said in the first post, makes him the luckiest guy in the world. He hated gays (till the polls said otherwise), he was a corporate whore, he loved pervasive unconstitutional government surveillance and presided over a domestic spying program that Dubya only had wet dreams about, he loved bombing brown people to death with stealth drones - but because he’s not Trump now you guys think he’s Jesus 2.0. That was my point - being after Trump makes him the luckiest career politician in history because now people will turn him taking a dump on a table into ‘His corn was has so much better than Drumpf’s.’
I don’t know how many ways to say this, but he was a pretty good President on balance (by the standards of US Presidents throughout history) even when you ignore Trump entirely.
I can hardly blame a bunch of young people at a taco shop for getting excited by the idea of an impromptu visit by a man who, by your own admission, was one of the better Presidents in American history and certainly the best in their lifetimes.
But hey, maybe you’re right and they should have just spit in his taco and told him to fuck off,
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He also had to deal with a shitton of racism, both direct and systemic that didn’t affect previous presidents.
Was he flawed? Abso-fucking-loutely. But he was also hobbled from the start. Did he do things that have enabled the mess of today like expand the use of EOs? Was he more hawkish than most of us are comfortable with? Unquestionably.
Was he a fucking disaster? No. He was a human being, and last I checked, no human has yet to be perfect. GOAT? Probably not. But not the worst, either.
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He was certainly not the worst (and indeed, he was the least bad in decades), but you really need to acknowledge that ‘not fucking sheep in public’ is not the same as ‘Yes We Can’’.
You’re making excuses for him because he’s not Trump. Your post was possibly the most damning with faint praise I’ve seen in quite a while. Yes, he’s better than Trump. Low hurdle.
I am not damning him at all. Rather, I am acknowledging that he had more stacked against him than any other president whether before or after.
And he still did a better job than both his predecessor and successor. Not perfect, clearly not good enough for you, as you have repeatedly stated… But I am not interested in arguing this with you, given your demonstrated disdain for anyone with a differing opinion.
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Let’s get some history involved:
Obama wasn’t the worst President, although he may yet have the worst legacy.
But even the “good” Presidents were monstrous.
Yes, I have a clear disdain for your two-party bullshit that says if our guy is marginally less bad than your guy then our guy must be the second coming of Christ. Antigay, pro-assasination, pro-ubiquitous government surveilance-state charismatic corporate whore is still not good. And that was Obama.
He’s less bad than the current assclown, no question, but it’s really annoying that you guys are so blindly binary that you’re not even able to acknowledge Obama’s weaknesses because the two-party shit doesn’t even allow you to have a single micron of nuance.
Edit: and I do realize that’s the entire point of the two party system, to let you earnestly protest that our splattery diarrhea is less bad than your corn-studded logs. It’s all bad, you’re just fighting over who gets to eat the corn.
