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What Has Obama Done for You Lately?
Posted: 10/06/2014 11:45 am EDT Updated: 56 minutes ago
BARACK OBAMA
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Can anyone tell me what President Obama's second-term goals are? What has he accomplished? What would he like to accomplish?
A little bit of immigration reform? Wow! What else? Still waiting.
I've never seen a guy want to coast this much as president. Even Bush who couldn't wait to get out of office and be an ex-president was at least still trying really bad ideas to the end. What in the world is President Obama's agenda?!
So, in foreign policy, it's apparently "don't do stupid shit." Okay, forget Republican criticism, which is that this strategy does not involve starting enough wars (that problem has been fixed, by the way). But think about the emptiness of that idea. It assumes that you have nothing you want to accomplish and would just like to skate by until you're done.
If at the end of his eight years in office, President Obama's team got to say, "We killed bin Laden and didn't do anything too stupid," they would hang up a Mission Accomplished banner. That's so sad. My God man, what is your vision of the world?
Would you like to push global education? Promote secular values so that we can defeat the ideology behind Islamic fundamentalism? Engagement with China? De-escalating needless tension with Iran? Or go the opposite direction and say it's to go to war against all terrorists everywhere -- okay, don't -- but you see my point. I find it amazing that he hasn't cared enough to come up with an idea of where he would like to lead the world. The most powerful man on earth has hit the off switch.
This is part of the reason he gets pushed around by one storm after another as Republicans and the Washington establishment keep yelling at him to do one thing or another. He either does it 20 percent of the way or 80 percent of the way. How much does he go his own way? Zero percent. Because that way doesn't exist.
In domestic policy, it seems like the administration is saying, "We passed Obamacare. What else is there left to do? That's our legacy. Why, did you want us to do something else?" Yes, actually we did. There are dozens of progressive priorities that are not even being considered.
What a wasted opportunity. Are there still the ardent Obama defenders out there who are going to tell me he is playing three dimensional chess and that we are finally going to see his progressive policies once he leaves office? Go ahead, hit me with your best shot. What do you think, in your wildest dreams, is President Obama going to do in the couple of years he has left?
Yeah, I didn't think so. What did you do? Yes, you came up with a list of excuses as to why he can't get anything done and mainly blamed Republicans for all of our troubles. Admit it, that's exactly what you thought. Ok, Republicans suck. Get beyond it. We could at least try to beat them, couldn't we? We could at least lay out what our vision of the world is and fight for it.
And if you're on team Democrat and you don't care about policy or getting anything done, you just want to have Democrats win and then do nothing, fine, then let me give you this political warning. There is no way in the world you can play prevent defense for four years. This will blow up on Obama. Trying to run out the clock is a terrible idea in sports and an even worse idea in politics.
The base has been eviscerated. There is no vision. The approval ratings have been battered. And President Obama hasn't really done anything colossally wrong yet. That's why you have Fox News invent nonsense non-scandals like the IRS because they don't have anything real on him. His biggest real problem has been that he has continued George Bush's foreign and economic policies. Of course, the right-wing doesn't want to criticize him for that. But what if he does at some point make a real mistake? The roof is going to cave in.
We have a do-nothing president to match our do-nothing Congress. Gee, I wonder why nothing gets done in Washington? Imagine a progressive president fighting to fix the insane economic inequality in the country or to end the senseless drug war or best of all battling to get money out of politics. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Well, that's not the president we have. We have one who is coasting. But God knows what he's coasting toward.
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