President Obama: What's next?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I could see why you thought to put it here, but the discussion doesn't seem to be much about the president.

[Frelga]

I found this to be a pretty powerful image, regardless of personal agreement or disagreement with the President.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I thought so, too, Frelga.

[superwizard]

Pictures like that remind me how intense the pressure is on Obama as the first black POTUS. I never envy any president their job but his must be especially burdensome.

I remember watching his inauguration in a dorm room and feeling that everyone sitting there was thinking the same thing. That, whether or not they had voted for Obama, they felt that this a sign of the rise of a new generation in America. Now, several incidents after that have quickly reminded me that race is by no means a solved issue in the United States, but one can only hope that we are progressing...

[Alatar]

Can anyone explain this to me?

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news ... /#50078688

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Al, I wish I could. I found it to be the most incomprehensible action taken (or not taken, to be more precise) of that extraordinarily incomprehensible body, the U.S. Senate. After all, the treaty is modeled after the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act. There is nothing it that is not already law in the U.S. Nor does being a signatory to the treaty obligate the member country to pass specific laws, nor can it be used as the basis of a lawsuit.

The only specific objection that I have seen is that it would somehow lead to the state deciding how to deal with disabled children who are homeschooled instead of their parents. Why they think that this is the case more than the already existing ADA is a total mystery to me.

It is, so far as I can tell, purely a case of irrational obstructionism. This is all the more the case since the treaty was actually negotiated by the George W. Bush administration, modeled on the ADA which was promoted by and signed by his father, George H.W. Bush, and had the support of many prominent Republicans like former Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, who recognized that this treaty would actually help disabled Americans (including veterans) who might work abroad.

I'm sorry if that sounds harsh. If anyone has a better explanation for this, I would gladly hear it and try my best to understand.

[axordil]

But...but...it's the U.N.! Faceless foreign commie bureaucrats! Black helicopters!

[JewelSong]

I think it has something to do with not appearing to "pander" to the UN and (somehow) giving China more power...in preparation for 2016. And to somehow mollify the Tea Party.

The Dems say they'll bring it up again and I hope they do. They only need 5 or 6 more votes.
"

[tinwë]

The clip hinted at the explanation. There are moderate Republicans who fear a primary challenge from Tea Party radicals and know they are vulnerable (see Richard Lugar). In the minds of some conservatives the U.N. is right up there with abortion, Islam and gay-marriage in terms of evilness, so supporting anything with the U.N.'s name anywhere close to it is tantamount to treason. The moderates know the Tea Party candidates will use this against them, so they voted against it, despite all of the common sense reasons to support it. I'm sorry, but in my opinion common sense gets thrown out the window where the Tea Party is concerned.

The Republican party establishment is also terrified of the Tea Party, and probably rightly so. In the above mentioned case of Richard Lugar, what was considered one of the safest Republicans seats in the Senate ended up in Democratic hands thanks to a Tea Party candidate knocking out the highly respected long term incumbent, Lugar, in the primaries and then handing the election to the Dems after making bat-shit crazy comments about rape and abortion in the general campaign.

I do hope they bring this back up again, but I don't know how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem where in order to keep the moderates in office they have to appease the lunatic fringe. It's a very sad situation.

[axordil]

It's a cleft stick of their own making.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm fairly shocked to be saying this, but Paul Krugman (of all people) writing in Rolling Stone (of all places), absolutely nails my opinion about the Obama presidency:

In Defense of Obama

It is well worth reading.

[Frelga]

I also tend to agree on most points, although I consider Obama's handling of the Arab Spring a barely mitigated disaster.

[Primula Baggins]

I also recommend that article. It is not a piece of unmitigated Obama worship, but it does make some strong arguments that he has been much more successful than either angry conservatives or bitter progressives will admit.

[Passdagas the Brown]

Though I have disagreed with this Administration's strategy-less foreign policy, "too late" approach to foreign affairs (particularly in regards to Syria), and belief that humanitarian intervention, such as in Libya, can be done via airpower alone (without the need to commit stabilizing forces on the ground) I believe his has been a rather successful Presidency thus far - perhaps even an historic one. And note that there are still two years left in it!

On the Krugman article: The fact that getting rid of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi are not on Krugman's list is a travesty. Those events are so consequential to so many people that it's amazing to me how they can be ignored. Navel-gazing has always left us liberals seeming weak on foreign affairs, and Krugman's article doesn't help.

But on all his other points, I generally agree. Though Obama's legacy on climate change is much weaker than it should have been (but I blame that on the GOP and Rahm Emmanuel, not the President).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Perhaps I'm too much of a creative type, but I can think of myriad ways to make it work. [President Obama], in my view, is simply not a visionary [president]. He aims for the middle.

-PtB

Oh wait, you were talking about Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, not President Obama as a policy maker. But I suspect you probably would say the same. And I would largely agree.

[River]

Not sure if this belongs here or its own thread, but given that the severe dysfunction in the Legislative Branch is making it hard for the President to do his job, I'll put it here.

From Esquire: HELP, WE'RE IN A LIVING HELL AND DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET OUT. The overall gist is that not even people in Congress like the institution right now and the main problems are huge pools of outside money pushing the agendas of a very wealthy minority, a media machine that thrives on these poilitical gladiatorial games, and, of course, a handful of jerks. A very small handful, but jerks are like hot pepper flakes. A few go a long way.

I spoke with ninety members of the House and Senate about what's gone so wrong in Congress. Sometimes it got a little emotional.

"I didn't get elected to Congress to not get things done—most people here want to get things done. I didn't get elected to Congress to make meaningless speeches on C-SPAN and tell lies about people. I didn't get elected to Congress to scare the hell out of the country and drive the sides further apart. I didn't get elected to Congress because I love politics—I hate politics, to be perfectly honest, and if I didn't before I got here, I do now… ."

The man is very angry, about the way his life is going, about Washington, about some things he has found himself saying that he wishes he could take back—he got carried away, total herd mentality, just so juvenile. People in public life should take stuff back more often, apologize more, and correct course more—now that would be making a real statement, maybe even be a breath of fresh air for the public. But he would just be screwing himself, he goes on, because those guys at Heritage Action or Club for Growth or Americans for Prosperity or some other goddamn group with an Orwellian name that thrives off of division and exists to create conflict might primary him, drop $3 million on his head, and he would be dead. And the way his district is drawn, you can't ever be conservative enough. He could get up at one of his town halls and say that the president is a transvestite Muslim from Mars and get a standing ovation. He wants to do the right thing and make a public stand for greater decency and civility in public life. But he can't. Oh, in his own quiet way he does. He has many friends who happen to be Democrats. "No matter what it seems, we don't hate each other," he says. "We are civil, we try to get to know each other, and most of us work hard to find areas of agreement, things that we can make progress on. People are stunned when I tell them that, because from the outside it just looks so bad."

[Passdagas the Brown]

Perhaps I'm too much of a creative type, but I can think of myriad ways to make it work. [President Obama], in my view, is simply not a visionary [president]. He aims for the middle.

-PtB

Oh wait, you were talking about Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, not President Obama as a policy maker. But I suspect you probably would say the same. And I would largely agree.

Great insight! And generally true, at least on foreign policy (as I think he was quite a visionary on domestic issues, such as healthcare reform, for example). Though I would argue that artists should never aim for the middle (or steer clear of it as much as possible), while political leaders of democratic systems need to do just that.

[Túrin Turambar]

My concern with Obama, as I think I have already written here, is that he would like to be some sort of unifying non-partisan head-of-state figure rather than a politician and head of government. I think Denethor’s line about wanting to be a “king of old” is almost appropriate. He does not seem to want to fight to get policies through, nor does he strike me as being particularly detail-oriented. For example, he spoke of “the moment when the rise of the ocean began to slow, and the planet began to heal”, but does not seem to me to have formulated a clear and robust plan on how he would achieve that, nor does he seem to have had the interest in fighting Congress and, more importantly, the voters who had set themselves against him, to try and get it.

I also think he is something of a victim of the times he lives in. America’s power in the world has waned since the 1990s and its internal problems in areas like the costs of healthcare, the budget, immigration and the like have increased. Obama’s Presidency has been dominated by economic difficulties, the continuing rise of China, a newly-belligerent Russia, and now the apparently-unchecked expansion of Islamic State in the Middle East. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who faced similar circumstances, responded to a journalist who asked him about the biggest challenges of office with the line “events, dear boy, events”. Obama’s position is not too different.

[yovargas]

I know it's controversial, even amongst the left, but I'm really, really please that Obama moved ahead with his immigration orders. It's probably my favorite thing he's done as president.

[River]

From what I've gathered, most of the fuss on the left is it's too little too late. Of course, there's not much he can do via executive order and I suspect that there were a lot of reasons for the timing.

The uproar from Congress is more than a little hilarious given that a bipartisan Senate bill has been rotting in the House for a couple years. Nor has the House advanced a bill of their own.