Tag Archives: Obama

May 28, 2011 · 6:30 pm

Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich | | AlterNet

Great article from Kevin Drum at “Mother Jones” reposted at Alternet.com.

This is really worth reading if you are still tying to figure out why things did not turn out as well as some of us hoped after the 2008 Elections…

In 2008, a liberal Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.

Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it’s not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama’s economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama’s election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.

More:  Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich | | AlterNet.

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April 28, 2011 · 8:34 pm

For Birthers, Obama’s Not Black Enough | The Nation

Fascinating article about President Obama and Racism in “The Nation”.

Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full story:

Remember when the media regularly asked if Barack Obama was “black enough” to get the support of African-Americans? In 2007 pundits wondered if a black-identified but technically biracial candidate who came of age in the post–civil rights era, was raised far from traditional African-American communities, was educated in the Ivy League and boasted a foreign name might be more palatable to white voters than black ones. Today this query seems hopelessly naïve and endearingly optimistic about the fluidity of American racial identities. After the secret-Muslim accusations, the witch doctor posters, the “You lie!” shout-down and the chimpanzee e-mails—it is clear that President Obama is certainly “black enough” to experience both racially motivated public attacks and exceptional support among racial minorities.

But the tenacity of the birther movement has revived the issue of Obama’s blackness for me. Nearly a quarter of Americans, most of them white, believe President Obama was not born in the United States. The resilience of the birther myth—lately given air by Donald Trump—has even forced the White House to post a copy of Obama’s birth certificate online in hopes of settling the matter once and for all. Good luck—this controversy isn’t about documentation; it’s about deeply held beliefs, even faith claims, about who is and is not a legitimate citizen.

Many on the left say that birtherism is just racism, but there’s more than simple racial animus behind it. I suspect that part of the problem is that Obama is indeed not black enough; specifically, the president is not sufficiently Negro—the historical variation of blackness that is uniquely and indisputably American.

via For Birthers, Obama’s Not Black Enough | The Nation.

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April 27, 2011 · 8:36 pm

Cagey Obama Sets an Election Trap for Paul Ryan and the Koch Bros. | | AlterNet

Very smart Politics….

From Alternet.com:

By baiting Ryan to present his budget plan before the administration unveiled its own, Obama deftly played Ryan’s own star-pupil, parent-pleasing nature against the eager Wisconsinite. When the president unveiled his own budget plan at a televised speech two weeks ago in Washington, he invited Ryan as his guest, and then issued a broadside against Ryan’s plan, saying it was “less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”

“There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” Obama continued, as Ryan looked helpless on. “And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of the America I know.”

The Republican was clearly taken aback. “When the president reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch,” Ryan told McClatchy Newspapers. “Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.”

Since then, Obama has continued to hammer away at Ryan. On the campaign trail in California, Obama used the words “fairly radical” to describe the Ryan plan.  “I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous,” Obama said.

via Cagey Obama Sets an Election Trap for Paul Ryan and the Koch Bros. | | AlterNet.

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March 24, 2011 · 8:35 pm

Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post

Glad to see the re-elect numbers so high…

And the race issue with White People doesn’t surprise me.  The whole Tea Party thing is really just a cover for racism.

There are a lot of White People who just can’t deal with the fact that we have a Black/African American President.  And they have a lot of trouble admitting it-even to themselves.

The good news is that we are well on our way to being a multi-racial society and in less than 50 years, White People will be a minority.  Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group.  That’s something else that scares them…

Demographics and trends continue to support a growing Democratic Party and a dying Republican Party in the long run…

If we can just survive the short run without the GOP destroying everything…

Dave Weigel notes that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are higher than George W. Bush’s or Bill Clinton’s were at this point in the political cycle. You can come up with a lot of reasons for that, but the big one seems to be “ninety-two percent of black voters want to re-elect Obama, as do 66 percent of Hispanics. Only one percent of blacks (!) and 16 percent of Hispanics want to vote against Obama. That’s the source of the positive re-elect number — break it down to white voters, and only 36 percent of them want to re-elect him.”

In “Obama’s Race,” Michael Tesler and David Sears mount a strong case: Far from ushering in a “post-racial period” in American politics, Obama’s election “was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record and, perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to to and racially liberal support for Obama.”

Another way to say this is that far from marking the end of us-vs.-them elections associated with Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern strategy, the 2008 election was arguably the beginning of its inverse: an electoral campaign where race, because of the skin color of the Democratic nominee, was a central issue, but this time, the “racially progressive” coalition proved larger than the racially conservative coalition. Call it the Northern strategy.

What’s interesting, though, is that the racial polarization has continued into Obama’s presidency.

via Race and the 2012 election – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post.

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March 19, 2011 · 11:01 am

Avoiding the President | Mother Jones

I’ve noticed this dynamic and assumed it was because the GOP still does not consider President Obama a legitimate President since they think he was born on Mars or something….

I forgot how well he can play them when they go one to one….

May be some truth here….

It is disgusting how the Republicans and special interest groups like the NRA  disowner not only President Obama, but the Office of the President.  Can you imagine how they would have screamed if Dems had treated Bush this way?

Still, in the past there’s always been a bipartisan assumption that the president is the president, and if he invites you to a meeting, you go. That’s broken down recently, and I attribute it to two things: Obama’s appearance at the Republican retreat last January, followed by his healthcare summit a month later. When Obama offered to speak at the retreat, Republicans let him do it. He’s the president, after all. And when Obama initially proposed the healthcare summit, even uber-obstructionist Bill Kristol echoed the old school sentiment: “Obviously when the president invites you to the White House, you go.”

But no longer. Now conservatives do their best to delay meetings at the White House, or they just outright refuse, as LaPierre did. Why? I think it’s partly because Obama scored such obvious public opinion wins at both the retreat and the summit. He’s mastered the art of controlling the conversation and sounding like a voice of reason in settings like this, and conservatives — especially tea party conservatives — don’t trust themselves any longer to come out ahead when they’re negotiating with him. They now consider even closed-door meetings at the White House to be traps, and they are, to put it bluntly, afraid of Obama. I’m not quite sure whether that’s good news or bad.

via Avoiding the President | Mother Jones.

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March 15, 2011 · 6:54 pm

Poll: Budget Impasse Cements Public’s Disapproval of Washington – The Washington Post

Interesting Poll results out today from the Washington Post/ABC News.

In summary, everyone thinks government is broken, many more people trust President Obama to handle the economy than the GOP and people have lost faith in the Republicans on the economy.

Serious Buyers Remorse on the GOP Congress….

The early battles in Washington this year have cemented the public’s disapproval of the political system and the country’s leadership, with confidence in congressional Republicans sagging and majorities disapproving of how President Obama is handling top domestic issues, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

In a sweeping indicator of dissatisfaction with Washington, just 26 percent of Americans say they are optimistic about “our system of government and how well it works,” a low point in polls dating to 1974. This gloomy assessment is shared by Democrats and Republicans, even as they agree on little else.

AND

When it comes to dealing with issue No. 1, the economy, Obama has an advantage: 46 percent say they put more faith in the president, 34 percent say so about congressional Republicans. Obama has a similar 12-point lead on the question of who better understands the economic problems people face, and a nine-point edge on dealing with the deficit.

via Poll: Budget impasse cements public’s disapproval of Washington – The Washington Post.

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March 2, 2011 · 8:59 pm

Public Policy Polling: Obama strong in Virginia

It’s early, but this is still good news…

Maybe my old home state is regaining it’s sanity….

Now, if only Tom Perriello will run for Jim Webb’s open Senate seat and win, I’ll almost feel safe to cross the border again…

Virginia seems like a state Republicans almost have to win next year if they want to take back the White House but if the voting was today Barack Obama would take it again by a margin comparable to or greater than what he won in 2008.

Obama leads Mitt Romney by 6 points in the state at 48-42. That’s identical to the size of his victory over John McCain in 2008. After that his leads increase to 8 points over Mike Huckabee at 51-43, 12 over Newt Gingrich at 51-39, and a whooping 19 over Sarah Palin at 54-35.

Part of the reason Obama’s doing well in Virginia is that he has respectable, if not great, approval numbers there. 48% like the job he’s doing to 45% who disapprove. There are two keys to his solid standing. The first is that 87% of Democrats stand with him- that’s an indication he’s generally holding onto white voters within his party, even ones who might lean a little bit more to the conservative side of the ideological spectrum.

The other key to his standing is that he’s coming close to breaking even with independents- 48% disapprove of him to 42% who approve. It may seem counter intuitive that negative numbers with those voters are a good sign for Obama, but after two straight election years where independents in Virginia leaned toward the GOP by a margin of about 30 points a Democratic politician getting just slightly negative reviews from them is progress.

via Public Policy Polling: Obama strong in Virginia.

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February 25, 2011 · 6:22 pm

Right-Wing Rage and Democratic Presidents – Salon.com

A little historical perspective from Salon.com….

As I’ve noted before, the behavior that has come to define conservative activism in the age of Obama — reflexive opposition justified by overheated, irrational and hysterical claims about Obama’s legitimacy and motives — shouldn’t have caught anyone off-guard. We saw this show before, when Bill Clinton was president and the right became obsessed with wild conspiracy theories (remember Vince Foster’s suicide?) and convinced itself that the president and his wife were part of some countercultural, socialistic plot. And we saw it when Jimmy Carter was president (although the dynamics were a little different, since Carter spent most of his term at war with liberals in his own party) and we saw it when Lyndon Johnson was president. This is just what the right does when Democrats run Washington.

In this sense, the exchange at Broun’s town hall meeting is reminiscent of Jesse Helms’ reaction in November 1994 to the news that Clinton would be visiting a military base in North Carolina. “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here,” Helms said. “He’d better have a bodyguard.” Not surprisingly, Democrats reacted with outrage and Helms’ GOP Senate colleagues prodded him to recant; he ultimately admitted that it had been a mistake to make the statement, but then added, “Of course, I didn’t expect to be taken literally.”

Helms wasn’t speaking for every Republican or every conservative when he opened his mouth, but his utter personal contempt for Clinton was indicative of the right’s mid-’90s mind-set. His “bodyguard” quip came just weeks after Republicans posted massive midterm election gains, their strength particularly pronounced in North Carolina and other Southern states, where white voters turned hard against Clinton and the Democrats. It’s hard not to read about Broun’s town hall exchange and see the same dynamic at work today.

Of course, the right’s attitude toward Clinton has changed dramatically these past few years. Not coincidentally, this reevaluation took hold at the same time that Obama emerged as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. Suddenly, expressing fondness for Bill and Hillary (and forgetting all about all of the nastiness of 1993 and 1994) served a practical political purpose for the right, helping them to portray Obama as a dangerous, extreme-even-by-Democratic-standards outsider — the same thing that they once claimed Clinton was.

In other words, maybe a decade or two from now, when some other Democrat is sitting in the Oval Office, don’t be surprised if Paul Broun is out there longing for the good old days when a reasonable, pragmatic, impossible-to-dislike Democrat named Barack Obama was running the country.

via Right-wing rage and Democratic presidents – Barack Obama News – Salon.com.

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February 23, 2011 · 8:42 pm

Obama and the GOP’s Spending Cuts: Where’s the Outrage? | Mother Jones

An interesting perspective….

The president also is striving to be Washington’s adult-in-chief, talking up the need for bipartisan negotiations and the potential for agreement across party lines. He’s ceding the politics of defiance to the Republicans. This could well be because his approval ratings have ticked upward since he hammered out the bipartisan tax-cut deal with the Republicans in December. He seems to be content to let the Republicans be the food-fighters, so he can position himself as a rise-above-them leader—which, presumably, will enhance his appeal among independent voters.

But there’s something else: recent public opinion polling. At a retreat of Democratic senators last week, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin presented bad news: Republicans had gained the edge in the debate over government spending. Voters, especially independents, he told the Dems, care first and foremost about improving the economy, but they believe the better way to do so is by cutting spending, not investing. That is, many voters have accepted the GOP’s fundamental talking point.

If that’s true, Obama and other Democrats facing reelection in 2012 have to be careful about coming across as opposing spending cuts. Garin’s polling, according to Bloomberg, did show that voters do not fancy spending cuts in law enforcement, education, and medical research—actually the sort of cuts House GOPers are pushing. This might suggest that Obama could score politically by confronting Republicans over these cuts (in similar fashion to the way President Bill Clinton won the showdown with the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans in the 1990s over GOP-desired spending cuts). But this polling also indicates that voters view spending cuts in general as the path to economic recovery and trust the Republicans more than Obama when it comes to dealing with the budget deficit.

So Republicans could be vulnerable politically if voters come to believe they are cutting too much, but Obama and the Democrats could lose out, if voters (especially indies) don’t believe they are truly committed to spending cuts. Consequently, Obama has a fine line to tread. He must oppose the Republicans’ deep cuts without doing so in a way that would cause voters to question his commitment to more prudent cuts. Such a stance demands political finesse. The GOP, though, has a rather simple message: government spending is bad for the economy, so cut, cut, cut, and cut again. The Obama argument is three-fold: some government spending has to be decreased; much spending is necessary (though it can be spent more efficiently); and in several areas, the government must spend more for a future payoff. In the budget fights ahead—if the tussle does boil down to bumper sticker versus nuanced explanation—the adult in the room may not have the advantage.

via Obama and the GOP’s Spending Cuts: Where’s the Outrage? | Mother Jones.

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July 1, 2010 · 10:34 pm

Professors rank President Obama 15th Best President, George Bush Ranked One of 5 Worst

I know this is going to raise the blood pressure of some of my friends and family…

Interesting article.  While Obama has not done as much as some of us would like, we sometimes forget that he has accomplished an awful lot in a short period of time…and came into quite the mess to clean up from the Bushies…

In the overall ranking, Obama rated two places below Clinton, who was 13th best, and three better than Reagan, who is ranked as the 18th best.

Franklin D. Roosevelt again earned the top spot, as he has every time since the poll was first conducted in 1982. He and the Mount Rushmore presidents — Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — have consistently been the top five presidents in the poll’s findings.

Obama’s 15th ranking is slightly higher than other presidents who have taken office since the poll started nearly 30 years ago. Most start out at about number 20, said Siena statistics professor and poll director Douglas Lonnstrom.

“[Obama’s] doing a little better, but he’s generally in the same ballpark,” he said.

While he ranked high on traits like imagination (6th), communication ability (7th) and intelligence (8th), Obama rated poorly ratings on background (32nd), which was composed of traits like family, education and experience.

Lonnstrom said the main factor that gives a president a top-five or top-10 ranking is his accomplishments — and an all-around high ranking in most categories.

FDR, for example, ranks in the top 10 for every category except integrity, he said.

“The experts really are looking for consistency, a president who is looking good across most of these categories,” he said.

Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was ranked at number 23 in 2002 — the last time Siena’s presidential expert poll was conducted — but has since dropped to number 39, qualifying him as one of the five worst presidents. Bush came in at number 42 — second to last — on issues such as handling the U.S. economy, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence. (Warren G. Harding was rated the least intelligent president).

Bush joins Harding, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, all of whom have consistently ranked as the worst presidents since the poll started, in the bottom five.

via Professors rank President Obama 15th best president – Emily Schultheis – POLITICO.com.

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