LogFAQs > #932057280

Both were kinda lousy in their own way. However, we won't know the full fallout from the Obama administration for years to come, even though the race riots and racial unrest today are largely owed to his open criticisms of police and unabashed support for BLM in its early stages which helped to stoke public sentiment in that direction.

Bill Clinton created an increased federal debt obligation by shifting the unemployed onto disability, had a hand in the mortgage crisis, instituted draconian justice policies that helped create our current system of mass incarceration, actively blocked intervention in the Rwandan Genocide, etc.

Zareth posted...

Both were actual left-leaning centrists, unlike Zeus.

He called my name, which means I get 45 seconds to respond! At any rate, I'm not sure I'd consider either of them anything close to left-leaning centrists, although Clinton was obviously closer to center than Obama. However, Clinton still passed the most sweeping gun ban, he attempted to push a public health option,

As for Obama, I'm not sure what stances you'd even consider conservative to balance out his liberal ones. In Clinton's case, you could put out that he was harder on crime than most Republicans, he passed DOMA, and he repealed banking regulations, among other things. Obama was consistently left, although sometimes he took more pragmatic stances because he wasn't sure the things he actually wanted would go through.

lihlih posted... Although Clinton was a pretty good president, he was president during the time where the internet was becoming mainstream and a lot of businesses were starting and thriving because of it. He had a very unfair advantage, and pretty much anyone not named Trump or Bush would've had similar results, albeit prolly not as sucessful.

Pretty much. Clinton didn't create the success or do much to contribute to it, he just benefited from a bubble that happened under his watch and began to tank at the start of GWB's. He also made security cuts that might have helped enable 9/11 and, of course, he had a bigger hand in the mortgage crisis than GWB.

Likewise a lot of the things that helped us recover from the mortgage crisis were passed right towards the end of GWB's presidency, although president-elect Obama had some role in a few of the discussions. However, most of the real recovery didn't involve the government at all and it might have been faster if somebody other than Obama (or GWB, for that matter) had been president.

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There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist.