Clinton enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while Obama was much friendlier in general to LGBTQ people
Clinton enacted DADT with the blessing of the liberal movement while Obama dragged his feet on gay marriage until long after the SCOTUS had ruled on Obergefell v Hodges. The Respect for Marriage Act wasn’t even Obama’s legislation. It was signed in 2022 under Biden.
Unfortunately, under a fundamentally capitalist system, there’s not a lot that can be done to make sure real wages grow for the workers
Sure there is. The US Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If the President wants to raise wages, one of the most straightforward decisions he can make is to simply raise starting salaries for government workers. This instantly puts upward pressure on the national wage rate, makes federal jobs more desirable, and improves the economic conditions of millions of federal workers.
In fact, this is one of Obama’s few direct actions. He signed an EO raising base pay for federal workers to $10.10 back in 2014. A meager improvement, particularly when national cost-of-living had long since exceeded what amounts to a $20k/year salary. But hey? Notably better than $7.25.
I oppose a strong executive branch that can enact edict without oversight.
That’s cool. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You have no control over the extent to which Presidents exercise their authority.
You might applaud Obama for spending eight years sitting on his hands and boo Trump for taking a direct and aggressive role in shaping national policy. But Obama’s fecklessness put no constraint on his successor. No more than Clinton’s limited Bush. No more than Hoover’s limited FDR.
That’s an awful precedent.
Its a precedent that’s been in effect under dozens of prior administrations. You govern the country with the tools you’re given. Or you don’t. But there’s no reward for pulling a Calvin Coolidge or a Rutherford B. Hayes and sitting on the sidelines while your country circles the drain.
The only precedent you’ll have set is one in which your party gets booted from office when the people you’re selected to represent continue to suffer under conditions you failed to alleviate.
She had an enormous base of support and a rabid following for decades. She’s at least as likeable as Donald Trump.
The DNC is to blame for pushing an unlikable, unpopular candidate
The DNC does what the donors tell them. And Hillary commanded one of the most successful donor-bundling operations in the party’s history. In no small part because so many people liked her.
They’d rather lose with Hillary, than win with Bernie
That’s true. But Bernie also had a huge hurdle of likeability to overcome. He had at least as many dings on his score card, being an East Coast Jewish Man who once said nice things about Fidel Castro. Dude was DOA in Florida on that resume alone.
Where Hillary fucked up (and where Bernie had a lot of potential) was in the Midwest. And all that is thanks to NAFTA. The Democratic Party is still wrestling with the ghost of 1993 and Bill’s decision to move ahead with NAFTA after campaigning against it. Obama fucked Hillary horribly when he pushed ahead with the TPP, which dredged up all those skeletons and gave everyone in the Midwest flash-backs to the de-industrialization of the prior decade.
Trump was able to campaign on “America First” against a Democratic Party that is far too in-bed with international business interests to say anything in defense of domestic labor. Bernie could have countered that, which is the main reason why he was the preferred candidate against Trump.
But then, four years later, Joe Biden takes the stage and makes all the same “pro-labor” noises that Bernie is making. Plus COVID. Plus liberals being too terrified of Trump to contemplate anyone but the safest of safe bets.
Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office.
The Clintons weren’t advancing universal health care in '93. They advocated a network of regional private plans that would compete for membership under a single regulatory framework. They flatly rejected universal Medicaid expansion. Far from threatening private industry, it was designed as a means of guaranteeing poorer regional networks could thrive with state support (much in the same way Medicare Plan C and the privatized Veterans Care and the privatization of the USPS ultimately are just kick backs to local business owners).
One of the better aspects of the Obama plan was to simply up the qualified enrollment numbers of Medicaid. This was the only part of ACA that really worked. And it was only shoe-horned in to contain costs, as subsidized memberships in private plans had enormous administrative overhead that was normally covered by employers.
But, again, efforts to simply open up Medicaid enrollment to the general population was killed from within the Democratic Party. Even as written, the bill allowed individual states to block Medicaid expansion piecemeal. The private insurance industry had to be protected, both under Hillary’s plan and under Obama’s.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure?
If Obama and Clinton had supported Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for CT Senate, back when he won the primary in 2006, their odds certainly would have been better. But Obama and Clinton and their good friend Joe Lieberman had no intention of passing Medicare for All, because they were all - quite literally - heavily invested in the well being of the insurance industry.
Strange that the Democrats were never able to do the same under Trump or Bush.
You’re looking at a president and expecting a king.
I’m looking at an Obama and expecting him to exercise all the powers Congress invested in George Bush. I’m looking at a guy who was literally handed direct ownership of the entire financial system at the end of 2008 and choose to appoint a Fed Reserve hack to the Treasury who would hand it all back to the same bad actors that brought about the crash.
I’m expecting a President to behave like a President and not simply an employee of Wall Street.
(Am I pretending that Clinton didn’t happen? Yes.)
They were administrative repeats, minus the sex scandal.
Trade deals and bailouts and immigrant witch hunts and government shut downs and echoes of a prior war that they never managed to clean up. Both presidents focused themselves on the project of further privatization, with Clinton giving us HMOs and Obama delivering the ACA. Both presided over tech booms, which were promised as a panacea to poor wage growth. Both squandered their majorities and frittered away their executive authority, while the market economy swelled and the labor economy sagged. Both ushered in fascist televangelists because they couldn’t improve the material conditions of their constituents.
Your local medical system and its workers is the reason you’re alive. You’d be just as alive under a Single Payer model or a fully public health care model. Its very possible you’d be alive without the ACA, just a lot broker.
A pigeon playing chess may look like it’s doing a lot
You can place at least two of the biggest military conflagrations at the feet of that pigeon. Trump destabilized peace talks between Ukraine and Russia back in 2018, leading to border clashes and the eventual invasion in '21. And his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem kicked off a wave of Israeli/Palestinian violence that brought us to October 7th. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Obama inherited a failing economy
That he bequeathed to Trump eight years later. FFS, black wealth dropped 30% under the Obama presidency, primarily thanks to the robo-signing of foreclosures under his administration. He sided with WellsFargo and Bank of America over tens of millions of middle class homeowners and functionally bankrolled their illegal home seizures via TARP.
Trying what? When he took office in 2009, he had all the accumulated Unitary Executive authority accrued under Bush plus direct Treasury Ownership of the six largest banks in the country, plus a Senate supermajority and overwhelming House majority, plus the world’s most powerful military.
What did he do with all this in his first two years? Bailouts for the richest of the rich and Mitt Romney’s solution to insurance industry reform. No mortgage debt relief, despite naked criminal behavior by the banks his US Treasury Department then owned. No student debt relief. No emergency authorization to expand Medicaid and Medicare - something even dumb-dumb Trump happily waved through without Congressional approval by way of the Stafford Act. No immigration reform which he had the votes for but was afraid to pass without Lindsey Graham’s blessing. No climate change bill despite the fact that it was John McCain’s fucking bill, he just didn’t want to pass it without McCain’s official endorsement.
He did not try. He was notable for how much he didn’t do, particularly relative to Bush before and Trump after, because he was afraid of looking bad on cable news shows. He was entirely fixated on his public image, rather than on the real social impact of the administration he was orchestrating.
The GOP blocked the aid
The GOP didn’t block shit. They had no majorities anywhere in government for two full years.
The Super majority in the Senate didn’t even last a full year.
Donald Trump did more with a simple majority than Obama did with 60 votes. And when he lost that majority, he pulled every lever available to the executive branch. Trump was turning out executive orders as fast as his fat little fingers could sign them. Obama couldn’t even be bothered to nominate a full slate of federal judges to fill Bush-Era vacancies.
Finally, he didn’t lose shit in 2016. He wasn’t running
He didn’t try to campaign for Hillary in big swing midwestern states. Given how he was underwater on approval through most of his last year of office, maybe it wasn’t even the worst move. But this was yet another instance in which he just couldn’t be bothered to try.
If he’d done a great job, the Dems would have maintained their majorities and Hillary would have won the Presidency.
He did a shit job. He sold out to the big banks. He failed to implement democractic reforms and protect civil rights. He undermined public education, health care, and social welfare. He continued to funnel hundred of billions of dollars to military contractors, heightened tensions in Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately gave us the socio-economic conditions that made Trump a viable candidate for the Presidency.
But he talked good. So, for some reason, we overlook all of that.
I mean, “best” by what standard? He’s a continuation of the Reagan tradition.
I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that’s not available.
FDR got where he was thanks to a large popular movement that his administration ultimately undermined and dismantled. The guy that delivered Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles onto the American system was a compromise at best.
Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we’re taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn’t sink the ship.
These guys aren’t prime movers, they’re consequences of much larger and more sweeping social movements. I would love to be in a country that elects a guy like FDR, but I do not believe that magically making FDR president again would result in anything remotely like the policies we got under his original administration.
