LogFAQs > #909051137

Nrrr posted...

Every time I think back on the Obama administration I just cannot believe anyone still likes him and wants to go back to milquetoast neoliberal centrism. It will always be so shameful to have had all that excitement, all that support for change, and to have had almost nothing positive come from it, and in many ways things actually got worse because of it.

I dunno, I did see through Obama almost immediately (like literally during the election I was like "wait, this guy's political positions deviate from the consensus among Democratic politicians literally on zero issues, including obvious stuff like gay marriage").

I'm not as down on him as a lot of left wingers are though. Yeah, in any normal country those positions would be more at home in the Conservative pro-business party. But he was competent, and competence matters. He also had a decent degree of humility, and that matters too.

Let me explain what I mean.

I think of left wing vs right wing on an economic scale as kind of like adjusting spending bars in Sim City. Left wingers want certain bars high, like education and health care and welfare. Right wingers want to pump more of the city coffers into stuff like business initiatives, like police, like lowering taxes, like paying off debt (well...normal right wingers).

So that's how things look in an idea world, how do things look in reality? Kind of like that, but with lots of really stupid shit--giving government contracts to friends, corruption where politicians fill their own pocket, or direct lots of spending to their own neighborhood. Starting up giant multi-million dollar government projects, and then scrapping them before the projects get off the ground (my sister works in the Canadian government, and talks about the projects that get scrapped before they go public; massive waste).

So...back to Obama...would his policies come across as basically right wing in most first world countries? Yeah, for sure. But I can respect him for running a relatively tight ship. He was right wing but at least he was competent right wing.

This was not the same with Bush, who got tied up in the Enron scandal, for example. And...setting aside whether or not wars are good (obviously I think they are bad) started a second ground war when his generals made it clear that we would not have enough resources for Afghanistan if he did this.

This was also not the same with Clinton's husband, who ramped up the "war on drugs" more than any other president before or after him (prison populations ballooned under Bill, and stabilized under W Bush).

(I was too young to remember much about Bush Sr. or Reagan, although I do know they instituted trickle down economics, and then admitted after they left that these policies had been a failed experiment)

Which...as mediocre right-wing leaning as he is, probably leaves Obama as the best president of my lifetime. (Kind-of depressing really. Means most Americans don't know what an actually good political leader feels like).

Nrrr posted...

If Bernie gets the nomination it will be so infuriating to hear liberals trying to rehabilitate Trump.

I doubt they would. They're rehabilitating Bush just because Trump is worse in ways they didn't think a politician could manage to be worse than Bush. Bernie would shit all over Trump, though.
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