Wait, hasn't this term been less than 6 months old?  

As for what is going on, remind me what Mitt Romney would of done amazing in less than 6 months in office.  If you can't name it, maybe the issue is the American people.  In a country with a constitution based on "We the people" and a Democratically representatives who run things, if you are upset at the president, doesn't it say about the people as a whole for this?  And did you seriously blame Obama for the work of Michael Bloomberg regarding sodas?

Well said ... I really liked the Bolsa Familia program. Many countries in the West have taken a few page from the book those policies came from. I'm interested in seeing how his successor does though.

I personally liked some of the things Cardoso and Lula have done. But I’m looking from the outside, so my view might be different from yours. I understand Cardoso became rather unpopular towards the end of his term.

Yes, you are very right actually. And, yes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso became unpopular, but he is still my favorite actually. 

Not even kind of a joke.  Every time I see people blame things on "Obama's policies" I just roll my eyes, in that we rarely if ever get to see ANY president's policies act work in their pure form in that they don't make the laws, and this is particularly true in Obama's presidency in the historically high rate of blockage coming from the House.  

It's fair to disagree with his stances, as people have different viewpoints on policy and politics in general.  But anyone universally laying our issues at the feet of the president is overly partisan at best, downright naive at worst.  

I am no fan of W. and I would say the same for him (although in his case, except for the last two years, he had a rubber stamp for anything he proposed as a combination of GOP-led House and Sneate and the aftermath of 9/11 leading to too much deference and not enough careful consideration.  See Iraq as evidence.   And I'd argue that most of what we blame him for was really Cheny and Rove and behind the scenes manipulators even more than Bush.  History's going to see him as largely an empty suit/placeholder, blamed more for not taking control of his own administration more so than any particular decisions he himself made.)

Obama criticisms come from both sides of the aisle, frankly.  And there are definitely things to criticize, as there are with ALL human beings.  However, most of the complaints listed in this thread as direct complaints with Obama/the presidency are pretty easily debunked as manipulation of numbers and staistics, people being largely unaware of how the government actually works, and misunderstanding of the impact of previous decisions of Clinton and Bush years in general - from the top on down through Congress and even the Supreme Court and state and local governments.   There are just so few issues that can be traced to any one person at anyone time period.  The American system is too big, too convoluted, too intertwined to lay anything at any one man (or woman)'s feet unless you have an agenda in doing so.  

Like him, dislike him.  Favor hs views, disfavor them.  It matters little.  Doesn't change the realities and dire nature of the situation the country has lived in, really since 9/11 but especially since early 2008.  By nearly any objective measure, America is doing exponentially better than virtually any other location in the world in a difficult time period globally.  We can wish it were better all we want to, but there's little provable evidence that anyone could have managed these circumstances better.  And there are MANY ways we could be in a much worse hole here.

As for the new push to open credit, the problem lay not in the expansion of credit, really. At the housing crash/financial crisis core is the for-profit entities HANDLING of the problematic credit. Every sector of private economy has built into it the need to protect itself against potential loss. A certain percentage of credit cards are assumed to be bad debt when issues, and we all pay a higher APR to cover it, for example. Or a store charges us all 10% more or whatever the number is to cover what they know they will lose in shoplifted merchandise. The people issuing suspect mortgages didn't protect themselves nearly enough AND they knowingly sold that bad debt to others and so on and so forth until they exponentially buried the global system under bad debt that was unpaid for. (Similar to the US government and two unfunded wars, by the way.) It wasn't the initial bad loan per se that killed the economy. It was the actions AFTER making the loans that did us in.

Expanding lending in general is essential to our recovery. And banks aren't doing it. There are millions of people who are fine risks for mortgages that aren't getting them because they got caught in the crash through no fault of their own - - lost jobs, no jobs etc that defaulted on student loans in the short term, for example, that have since sorted out their situations but still have that negative report on their credit from five years ago that has no real bearing on their current credit situation. And they aren;t getting loans which is holding up the entire consumer market, especially in housing. They aren't saying go back to $500,000 mortgages to people making minimum wage. There's a difference.

Christ

Honestly. America fucked up by not following Iceland's lead and jailing all of the corrupt bankers. From the outside looking in. America has so much corrpution in its governement from Top to Bottom its a wonder your country is still standing...I was watching this MSNBC broadcast and this guy essientally went off and said the only way to fix the US is to basically purge the government and start anew. I know politics is usually a stage for arguments, but in America it seems like the politicans forgot that they're suppose to be fighting to better their country and all they've been doing is belittling eachother and blocking each other from making any progress whatsoever and this is from both sides not just the Democrats or Republicans.

Obama is actually the only good president the US has had in over 30 years, except for maybe Clinton. The rest of them were villainous and can even be described as disasterous in some cases.

certainly not, while he's not the greatest president ever, he's far from being the worst: people act as if if Obama came in right after the surplus that was left by Clinton not the two terms where two wars occured while Bush gave everyone a tax cut and the economic fall that happened right near the end of his term.

though my ideals tend to lean towars the left, I usually try to keep an open mind; but I have lost all faith in the Republican party; they seem to obtrusct everything that the democrats propose or that is slightly to the left and then act as if nothing is getting done. I believe that the 112th congress was deemed the least productive congress ever; it was either dead on arrival in the house or if by some miracle if it passed the house it would just get filibustered in the senate.