Is Obama the Worst President that we have ever had?

[fastyxx]

Crom said:

fastyxx said:
This will sound like I'm trolling the OP and like-minded people, but I'm not.

I don't think we're going to realize just how good he actually was at this job until a much later date. We'll still have the partisan agreement/disagreement on policy decisions and the like, but my read on President Obama is that he's playing chess when others are playing checkers. Now you might not like his brand of chess, and the House keeps knocking over the board and making people reset pieces, but I think most people are missing how skillful he actually is. (The relatively easy and wide-margined re-election not withstanding ----- blaming that defeat on Romney, as clueless and impolitic as he was, is very much head-in-the-sand mentality on the part of conservatives.)

Is this a joke?

 

Remember a couple of summers ago he named the summer "Summer of Recovery" Why would he name it that if he didn't think things were going to get much better? The Summer of Recovery was a huge failure. He obviously thought his policies would turn things around.

 

 

And now Obama is looking to repeat the same mistakes (pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit) as if he hasn't learned anything from the last time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-administration-pushes-banks-to-make-home-loans-to-people-with-weaker-credit/2013/04/02/a8b4370c-9aef-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

"The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession."

 

Obama is playing tiddlewinks while others are playing checkers.

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.