obama 2012 (?????)

[cacophony]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

will you vote for obama (hypothetically even) ?
do you think he will win?
do you think he deserves to win?

how can these questions be answered only 2 years into his 4 year term? a better question is if he were up for reelection NOW, would you vote for him blahblahblah.

i think he'd win. "deserve" to win is too loaded to answer, and seeing as there are no republican candidates who have appealed to me recently i'd probably vote for him again.

which is not to imply i was over the moon thrilled with my options during the last election. my vote was mostly based on my approval of joe biden. and following the election i've been mostly disappointed with obama's unwillingness to repeal or revise important civil rights violations and information restrictions enacted during the bush admin. he's prioritized things like don't ask don't tell, and while i feel that's an important issue it's not half or even a quarter as important as most of the pressing issues of today. so i feel like he's taking these easy wins on the smaller issues and refusing to deal with the big issues that affect our fundamental freedoms. which means the vast majority of his policymaking has been maintaining the status quo.

still, in an election it's a matter of who the alternate choice is. i haven't seen anyone i'd prefer at this point. which is unfortunate.

i just wish obama was more obamaish and less bushish.

[cacophony]

Originally Posted by King of Snake

Is guantanamo closed yet?

THANK YOU.

[Strangelet]

npr/political junkie did a poll for 2012 expected candidacy. this is the results. 6 months ago I would have said he had a chance to win over the centrists. That's probably not going to happen now with his idiot son running around.

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by cacophony

how can these questions be answered only 2 years into his 4 year term? a better question is if he were up for reelection NOW, would you vote for him blahblahblah.

OK, that's kind of what I meant anyway, but with a small caveat. Executive decisions are such that their vectors are set in motion early, and the effects play out long into the future, like for example invading Iraq, or permitting deep water off shore oil drilling. So its pretty clear that unless the next two years are devoted to redoing everything he's done these past two years, then I think its safe to say that we know what the Obama presidency is going to be.

Originally Posted by cacophony

i think he'd win. "deserve" to win is too loaded to answer, and seeing as there are no republican candidates who have appealed to me recently i'd probably vote for him again.

"deserve" might be loaded but it must be the most important question. Who deserves the presidency is why a lot of people, like myself, voted for Obama in the first place. I found it against my conscience to reward any politician who went with political expediency and supported the invasion in Iraq.

[Sean]

It's always hard to anticipate how the American people will vote, but personally, I think that Obama has been more effective than some here seem to give him credit for. First and foremost, economists generally agree that his administration's handling of the economic crisis they were immediately thrust into likely staved off a far, far worse scenario than we now have. Yet many people still focus almost exclusively on the shortcomings, or that we haven't fully recovered yet as if it was all an abysmal failure. In one article that outlines what the objectively verifiable results have been, they provide a pretty clear analogy:

"The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing."

And while the health care bill that's passed certainly has it's obvious flaws, we still have yet to see a single "death panel" come to fruition, we're not suddenly a communist country as a result, and armageddon did not happen. As a result, public approval of the bill has been on a steady rise, while opposition has been on a steady decline.

Of course there's been far more going on than just these two issues, but I have to get back to work. My point is, whether or not Obama is successful in 2012 will likely depend on whether or not we continue seeing steady, albeit slow, improvements in the economy, etc, and how well he and his campaign team are able to clearly communicate the objective successes they had in his first term in contrast with the relentless rhetoric we constantly hear claiming otherwise.

As a final note, I would agree that finally getting Guantanamo closed would certainly be a good, helpful thing.

[cacophony]

closing guantanamo (and not just replacing it with another guantanamo on another patch of foreign soil) would be the one thing that would make me guarantee my vote for obama come 2012.

[cured]

Originally Posted by cacophony

closing guantanamo (and not just replacing it with another guantanamo on another patch of foreign soil) would be the one thing that would make me guarantee my vote for obama come 2012.

So you're saying you'd like terrorists to run free in the US and live off our welfare while we use taxpayer money to pay for their trials?

/gop

[Troy McClure]

Originally Posted by cured

So you're saying you'd like terrorists to run free in the US and live off our welfare while we use taxpayer money to pay for their trials?

/gop

Lately, you could replace that 'terrorists' with homeless veterans, unemployed, and the poor and 'trials' with livelihood, food, shelter, medicine, and you get the GOP campaign slogan of this year.

/just saying.

[Strangelet]

I tend to agree with the lot of you. I too would lock my vote for Obama if Uncle Sam's Prison Camp and Fish Bait Shop were closed. That in itself, even though its one of many ethical bleeding sores in need of dressing, would show due diligence, good faith to his voting base.

And that's really one of Obama's biggest shortcomings. He leaves a vaccuum of trust that he should realize comes around when you sign an executive order to close Guantanamo the second day you're in office only to back pedal two years following because of "pressure from congress." Well the american congress has a low twenties approval rating so what the fuck. Are you POTUS or are you student body president?

SAN DIMAS HIGHSCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!!

I also agree that the economy will be just as much of a factor as the republicans resisting the urge to support a wing nut.

However I disagree that the economy/bailout was handled at all well by the Obama treasury. Part of this is my own ideology: I adhere more to the austrian school, the conservative perspective that bail outs done on debt is like a credit card company giving a shopaholic a little higher credit rating. Eventually they will still starve, its just going to take longer. The fact that even Krugman says we have all the signs of entering into a "third depression" (when was the second? and did it even end yet?) should be concerning. if this is true, Obama is fucked.

edited to include sources

http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/natio...epression.html

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op...-97315279.html