Obama's Legacy: A Great Man & Good President In Bad Times
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/01/obamas-legacy-great-man-good-president-badObama's Legacy: A Great Man & Good President In Bad Times
By Shaun Mullen
1/20/16 4:42am
There have been times over the last seven years when the hope-and-change mantra that propelled Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency seemed like a cruel fiction. Yet despite taking the reins of a war-weary nation in the midst of an economic calamity and having to endure the unrelenting enmity of an obdurate opposition party, Obama has wrought enormous changes during what has been the most transformational presidency in 80 years.
He has implemented far-reaching reforms in a dysfunctional health-care system, raised school academic standards, legislated pay parity for women, revolutionized the way we produce energy through harnessing renewable resources, fought back against global warming, taken on the epidemic of childhood obesity with his First Lady, provided deportation relief to young immigrants, legalized same-sex marriage and opened new opportunities for women and gays in the military. He saved the domestic auto industry, has added nearly four million jobs, reduced unemployment to 5 percent and the deficit by two thirds to a puny 2.5 percent of GDP, engineered egalitarian tax reforms and eliminated the most usurious of credit card abuses, while today the U.S. is an island of relative calm amid the global financial crisis. He also took out Osama bin Laden, isolated Vladimir Putin, normalized relations with Cuba, stabilized relations with Iran and ended the war in Iraq.
Obama's presidency has been, as a live microphone caught Vice President Biden saying on the day he signed the Affordable Care Act, "a big fucking deal."
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Although it hardly matters at this point, history will be kind to Obama. He turned out not only to be so much more than many of us give him credit for, he has been a transformational figure who happens to have been doing the most difficult job in the world while weathering vicious personal attacks.
Underlying his accomplishments, as well as his failures, is a humility that all great men possess. Everything bitter conservatives and disillusioned liberals said he was he has not been, and everything they said he could not be he has been.
Barack Obama has indeed been a big fucking deal.
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Best President of my lifetime! 
He had some rough spots along the way, but no presidency is without those.
What he has been up against is a GOP which decided in a secret meeting upon his first inauguration that they would oppose everything he attempted to accomplish.
Unfortunately it took a while for President Obama to realize this in spite of all the evidence that that was what the GOP was doing. That is my biggest regret of his presidency. He should have fought harder instead of trying to build a consensus with a party which wanted absolutely nothing to do with consensus.
That is where he failed.
However, his second term has been very good in that respect. So I think his legacy is well secure. He's no LBJ, who would call opposition senators in the middle of the night to do some rather severe arm twisting, but that isn't who Barack Obama is, and I am fine with that.
R&
