"The Case For Obama" - Rolling Stone

[damonm]

full article at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/220013

...The catalog of perceived betrayals unfolds something like this: The liberal lion who stirred Hope, vowed Change and roared about "the fierce urgency of now" has failed to stand up to Republican obstructionists, coddled corporate interests and allowed top liberal priorities — a public option for health insurance, climate legislation, immigration reform and the union-expanding "card check" — to fizzle without a fight.
(snip)
On the economic front, Obama has surrounded himself with the same free marketeers who led Bill Clinton's calamitous deregulation of big banks, restoring Wall Street to obscene profits even as one American in seven has been engulfed by a rising tide of poverty. Eric Alterman of The Nation distilled the left's lament this summer, arguing that Obama may have "fooled gullible progressives into believing he was a left-liberal partisan, when in fact he is much closer to a conservative corporate shill." The cover of The Obama Syndrome, a new jeremiad by the political commentator Tariq Ali, even gives the progressive resentment a lurid illustration: Obama's face is shown flaking away like a cheap plaster mask to reveal the chuckling visage of George W. Bush.

But such selective indictments — legitimate and troubling in many of their particulars — grossly distort the sweep of the 44th presidency. It's one thing to call the president on his shit. It's quite another to paint his entire presidency as shit — even if Joe Biden and Robert Gibbs are losing their shit, accusing you of being a "whining" member of the "professional left."
(snip)
But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president's — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan."

[Bitwit1234]

1. OH yeah and according to CNN Obama is a very unpopular

president and he has to call on Michelle to help him out to try to get Democrats elected. Correct me if I am wrong is his approval rate right around 29% like Bush and Cheney's. Now damn that was unpopular. Around 50% is pretty good to me.

[Recursion]

7. His approval rating approaching the first midterm exceeds Reagan's or Clinton's...

...as they approached their first midterm.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

11. This is the point that many of us are trying to make. Regardless of what the M$M says,

Obama's numbers are incredibly high, given all the challenges and problems that he confronts. It's simply unfair to compare him to Bill Clinton and certainly not to George Bush. I don't care what anyone says. Few presidents have ever been handed such massive, seemingly insurmountable problems. Not since the Reconstruction and certainly not since the Depression have we ever witnessed problems of magnitude that we now face as a nation. These problems were laid at the feet of this president. To expect him to correct them all in less than two years is absurd. Speaking of which, I don't remember any president where the bar was set so high that it is virtually impossible for him to reach. Meanwhile, the bar set so low for Reagan and Bush I and especially Bush II.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Here it is with headline & pic:

The Case for Obama
The charges are familiar: He's a compromiser who hasn't stood up to the GOP or Wall Street. But a look at his record reveals something even more startling — a truly historic presidency



By Tim Dickinson
Oct 13, 2010 1:15 PM EDT

The following is an article from the October 28, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

-snip-
From the outset, it was inevitable that Obama's transcendent campaign would give way to an earthbound presidency — one constrained by two wars, an economy in free fall and an opposition party bent on obstruction at any price. "Expectations were so sky-high for him that they were impossible to fulfill," says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. "Obama's partly to blame for this: People were expecting a progressive revolution. What the president has delivered instead is gritty, nuts-and-bolts, political legislative work — and it's been rough."
During his campaign, skeptics warned that Barack Obama was nothing but a "beautiful loser," a progressive purist whose uncompromising idealism would derail his program for change. But as president, Obama has proved to be just the opposite — an ugly winner. Over and over, he has shown himself willing to strike unpalatable political bargains to secure progress, even at the cost of alienating his core supporters. Single-payer health care? For Obama, it was a nonstarter. The public option? A praiseworthy bargaining chip in the push for reform.

-snip-
But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president's — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan."

Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."

What's even more impressive about Obama's accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. "He didn't have the majority that LBJ had," says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama's governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat — and Joe Lieberman.

In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the "Party of No" and its billionaire backers. "Obama is harassed as well as opposed," says Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. "The crazy Republican right is now unfettered. You've got a Senate with no adult leadership. And Obama's up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the professional right." Compared to the opposition faced by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds Wilentz, "it's a wholly different scale."

-snip-
In an hour-long interview with Rolling Stone, Axelrod struck a conciliatory tone. What Obama has delivered as president, he concedes, has fallen short of the expectations Obama inspired as a candidate. "I understand why there's this dissonance out there," Axelrod says. "But Democrats don't have the luxury of lamenting the fact that we've only gotten 70 to 80 percent of what we wanted done. Because that 70 to 80 percent is at risk."

That much, at least, is undeniable. In their Pledge to America, the Republicans have vowed to roll back health care reform and block any unspent stimulus funds. Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has promised to gut the consumer protections of Wall Street reform. Armed with subpoena power, Republicans could soon dog the administration with ginned-up scandals and kangaroo-court drama, even as the party tries to shut down the government under House Speaker John Boehner.
"There's so much at stake here," Axelrod says, almost pleading. "And we ought to fight like hell — because what's on the other side is a retrograde disaster."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/220013

[Whisp]

10. k&r, glad to see this.

(off topic but does anyone else see that repulsive ad at the bottom of this page? something bella... looks like a 10 years old boy getting it on with a passed out or roofied older girl.)

[ChimpersMcSmirkers]

14. Nice post and excellent article.

[JNelson6563]

17. This covers a lot!

good read, thanks for posting! :hi:

Julie

[Pirate Smile]

19. You're welcome.

:hi:

[ProfessionalLeftist]

3. Robert Gibbs can kiss my . . .

cat's dirty litterbox. ;)

[dennis4868]

4. Thanks for posting....

this article really lays out what Obama has accomplished and the shit he is up against and still has made tremendous progress in just a short period of time!

[kjackson227]

5. AAAAAMen!

[impik]

6. FU***** AMENNNN!

[CakeGrrl]

8. Big K/R - Hits the nail on the head

Long-term effects and gains vs. short-term reactions. I appreciate that the "Obama hasn't done anything" crowd has been called on that crap.

The detractors can make fun of the chess game if they like, but what's been accomplished will outlast that over time. The problem is people have annoyingly short attention spans and patience. It sucks that the Republicans have put everything down the shitter, but we were told time and again that it wouldn't be easy to fix. That ought to be obvious.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

9. Many of us have attempted to make these points...

1. Obama was/is NOT liberal and never pretended to be no matter how much the M$M, the wingnuts, and many liberals themselves asserted otherwise.

2. The absurdity of Obama being blamed for a lot of the problems created by the Clinton administrations and now Clinton is being treated as if he is the Patron Saint of the Democratic Party when many of his policies did a lot of damage.

3. The fact is that Obama's approval ratings are NOT in the tank, no matter how many times CNN, MSNBC and Faux News repeat that meme. Indeed is approval is higher than Reagan I, Bush I and Clinton I was during this point in their career. Why the media keeps asserting that nobody likes Obama anymore--even blacks--is not lost on many of us here at DU. The power of repetition is so powerful that perhaps the pundits feel that if they can repeat the falsehood often enough, perhaps it'll become a reality. Just like they keep repeating the inevitable--that Democrats are going to get slaughtered in the midterms; it only comes true if we let it by not showing up to vote. I don't believe one word of it. Not one!!

[JamesA1102]

12. Don't confuse the demagogues with facts. nt

[Phx_Dem]

13. Read it last night. It's a great read. K&R!

[emulatorloo]

15. Thanks for posting this. Rec n/t

[Pirate Smile]

16. kick

[jaxx]

18. a truly historic presidency

K&R everyone needs to read this.

[Scurrilous]

20. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Pirate Smile]

21. kick

[tavalon]

22. Wow

Seeing all of that together, I've just realized what my problem with Obama is. It isn't what he's accomplished, though I think he mishandled the health care "reform", there were so many things there that I had forgotten about. It's that he's an amazing governor and surprisingly, a lousy politician. I say surprisingly, because he was great at it as a candidate. There was a sentence in there, though, that indicated that he felt he needn't be out there stumping as the politics will take care of itself. But it won't and they have to see that by now.

I can't squish that five page article into soundbites and I cannot, with any self respect, use "vote for us because the other side is worse" in GOTV. So, I have to say, if this President can't govern and be politically on fire at the same time, that's a big problem. And for at least the next two weeks, he needs to be the candidate again. And then in the next two years he needs to figure out how to balance his two jobs. Perhaps he needs to delegate more because unless he gets out there and shows us the amazing things his team is doing, he isn't going to get to keep doing it. And if he doesn't light his political fire in the next two weeks, the next two years are going to be much harder for him governing wise.

Here I thought he was just conflict averse and now I find out he's too high minded to do the in the mud political fighting. The idealist in me could like that if the realist in me didn't see it for the losing prospect it's been and will continue to be.

We sent a fiery fighter to Washington and we got a hardworking policy wonk. We need him to get that he has to do both jobs. It turns out he's doing one well and one not at all. He has to do both.

[damonm]

23. "We need him to get that he has to do both"

A-freakin'-MEN to that!

[CBR]

24. This is fucking fantastic. nt