Seriously, wtf is up with this guy? As an American I was excited to hear promises of change and promises to wrest the power from the ridiculously wealthy elite, but now that he’s in office, he’s not even pretending to uphold his campaign promises. He was elected for his leftest principals, and now is governing like a Republican. He has decided to extend the Bush tax cuts for people making over ONE MILLION dollars a year. Why not just kneel down and suck the Walton family’s dicks while you’re at it? Discuss.
My dad has a bumper sticker (although it’s taped to his back windshield) that says “How’s all that hope and change working out for you?”
He came into the office neck-deep in shit left by Bush. What did you guys expect?
He came into office after campaign promises promising change and nothing else. What did you expect? He has no political experience. Your fault you didn’t choose a good president. Other dems would have been far better if you wanted things done.
Someone: NO ONE except former presidents have presidential experience. He’s a centrist (/not/ a liberal no matter how much the morons on the right try to make him out to be one).
To date, he’s had to deal with a Republican party whose party slogan might as well be “HELL NO YOU CAN’T!” and a ginormous amount of problems caused by the previous administration in all three branches.
Sure, he should be more left wing and should tell the Republicans to piss off, but he was a centrist from the beginning. Whaddaya expect?
Even still, he’s done wonders.
I wouldn’t blame the republicans for nothing happening. Have you not caught up with current events? Or is that just being principled? Republicans could do nothing with the Dems unwilling to compromise either. The blame lies at both their feet, don’t delude yourself.
Plus, he wasn’t really a centrist, just willing to compromise, which is admirable.
Um, no. The Republicans’ definition of compromise is “give us everything we want and we’ll think about it”. The Health Care Bill, for example, had over 100 amendments that Republicans wanted and none of them voted for it, and I mean zero, zilch, nada, goose-egg, “HELL NO YOU CAN’T!”
You can’t tell me that the Dems are unwilling to compromise. That’s just a rejection of reality.
You enjoy seeing life with a blue tint? Did you not just see what just happened?
Yes I did. Did you?
The guy isn’t all bad. The Bush tax issue is deeply troubling, and I can’t say he’s really on my best side, but the reality of American politics will pretty much crush the soul of anyone that tries to tame it.
At least he didn’t enter politics with all that baggage. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell gets a lot of press, but not something similar that is important to me. Thanks to Obama, in the first year of his administration, he made it a lot easier for me to have the sex on my license changed, and made it possible for me to have it changed on my passport before surgery.
That’s an issue pretty close to me, so I will always be grateful for that. But yeah, it’s really unfortunate what’s happened to him since then.
Wark: I’m sorry for the off-topicness but whenever I see your screenname, I hear “Fiddle de Chocobo” in my head. 
None of this would matter if you had any brains; or money, for that matter.
Poor people aren’t supposed to exist. You’re supposed to deal with that, not complain about it.
All things considered, especially once you examine the massive fraud perpetrated by the financial sector prior to the 2008 meltdown, and the outright lies, obscenities and blatant theft that continue to plague it even to this day, the fact that unemployment has held to below 10% is more impressive rather than depressing.
The real losers the past few years lie in the legislature, where the constant partisan line-drawing and ideological bickering has gutted everything resembling common-sense.
The reactionary election this past November is only going to make things worse. Congratulations, everyone has effectively frozen our government by splitting the house and senate so severely. Think it’s bad now? Wait another two years as nothing gets accomplished as worthless ideological entities on both the left and right preen and pose and make the other guy look bad leading up to the next presidential election.
Obama was entirely realistic in moving to the center. At least a bunch of a little of something has been accomplished, as opposed to an entire basket of nothing, so there’s that. There’s been more progressive policy established through compromise in the past two years than in the past 10 years previous.
Now, discontinuing some of the Bush era practices of throwing gobs of everyone else’s money at these liars and thieves behind the securities exchange fraud that perpetrated the financial meltdown in the first place by…stealing everyone else’s money… well that would be an excellent start to making real change happen, I can say that.
Precisely. The legislature just does not want to compromise, on either side. You cannot say one side is better than the other.
There was an annoying amount of Obama love in Britain during your election season, now it’s levelled out to the usual “he’s a political leader therefore he’s a wanker” ideal. I’m not certain how your senate works but if a split senate is anything like our recent election results it doesn’t bode well.
Well we don’t have any riots here yet.
True, you don’t have a pledge, party and student betraying hypocrite pretending to be a liberal democrat either.
The thing is, Someonerandm: The Democrats have been compromising six ways to Sunday. The Repubs have been “Give us everything we want and we’ll talk.”
hm, I imagine the situation of Obama like this: he was told to clean up a little tool shed and instead he got pushed into a huge chaotic warehouse.
So yeah, he thought he could change something but didn’t know how deep the shit G.W.Bush produced really was.
Only the Dems haven’t been compromising.