Traditionally the POTUS, once elected, tries to become more inclusive and willing to compromise. They used to invite the opposition Congressional leaders to dinner, and to golf.
Obama did neither, and spent his first 2-3 years snubbing the opposition, whining about them, blaming them for all of America's ills ("We were handed this recession", "We were handed this war"), denigrating their supporters ("they're clinging to their guns or religion"), and attacking them in nearly every speech.
In doing so, Obama inflamed rather than extinguished partisan passions. He could have, and should have, reached a compromise with the Republicans over the Affordable Care Act; they had made all sorts of proposals. However, with a temporary 60% majority in the Senate, he felt he didn't need to, and ended up signing a bill into law without a single Republican vote. Predictably, a year later he and his party were crushed by a massive sweep of Congress in 2010; the Democrats lost their super-majority of the Senate and they lost the House completely, and permanently.
Obama has inflamed race relations as well, with his constant race baiting proclamations that seem to affirm the rights of a minority to commit acts of violence against the police, in incident after incident.
Yes, Obama's "my" president in the sense that although I didn't vote for him, I accept the will of the majority. But his behavior as leader has been nothing short of abominable and I, like millions of other Americans, those whom you and your hero Hillary would call "deplorable" and "irredeemable", will be glad and relieved when he is finally and mercifully relieved of his duties. What a disaster he has been.
There are many facets to President Obama’s style of leadership, but collegial is not of them. Any fair review of Obama’s legislative history in Illinois or during his brief career in the U.S. Senate (spent largely running for President) will show no history of negotiation, consensus building, bipartisanship or even leadership.
Obama presented himself in 2008 as the post-partisan, post-racial consensus builder, but has been exposed as the undisputed master of agitation, and rabble-rousing, well schooled in the Alinsky organizing methodology. The President applies Alinsky’s maxim that self-interest is the only principle around which to organize people and he relishes re-creating the polarizing turmoil of the 1960s Illustrating just how infantile, petulant and utterly immature he is as a man and more importantly, as a leader.
Virtually every time President Obama speaks, too many Americans get the distinct feeling that they are the epitome of all that he hates about America.
During the past 8 years, the Obama administration has careened from one self-inflicted crisis to the next while blaming the boogeyman of the hour (health insurance companies, ‘Big Oil’, BP, Doctors who perform unnecessary surgeries, Republicans, the much aligned – ever ill defined ‘1%’, Mitt Romney, gun owners, and George W. Bush).
The perpetual demonization of such is not leadership, it is the action of a demagogue.
Obama’s agenda has long been clear to anybody who was willing to acknowledge it. He is a leftist who dislikes traditional American values and has spent much of his life studying how to disassemble our capitalist republican form of government in favor of a European-style “ruling class” autocracy.
Obama doesn’t believe in the actual Constitution. He doesn’t believe in traditional values. He doesn’t believe in limited government. He doesn’t believe that most people should work for what they get. He doesn’t believe that the government is subservient to the people. He doesn’t believe in balanced budgets. He doesn’t believe in…oh, pretty much everything that made America great.
This was apparent to anybody who was willing to do even the scantest research on his past words and deeds, and to ignore the lying rhetoric that the Obama folks spun to get him elected. Unfortunately, too many people were afraid of being labeled racists, so they voted for this guy.
There is something vulgar about Obama’s venal display of disdain for his opponents, classless and brutish too. It’s not rhetoric becoming the leader of the free world and of the most powerful nation on earth. There is something intemperate about Obama’s rhetoric, completely separate from the fact that it all just tries a bit too hard.
Obama’s rhetoric is pugilistic and aggressive, not thoughtful and compelling. The President seems to have achieved the pinnacle of Alinskism, the constant demonizing of opponents, without relent.
Our founders feared “factionalism” – today’s partisanship – more than most any other thing, aside from a too powerful president. Relishing and deepening the partisan divide for short political gains is loathsome, but what do I expect from people who are willing to borrow trillions from our children?
Progressives such as Barack Obama are bankrupt of ideas, so they stoke resentment to achieve their true goal: increased government control over everything.
This is how they got Obamacare passed: years of claiming that there were tens of millions of uninsured and they were flooding emergency rooms with costs that got passed along to us. The outrage!
Has much changed since the passage of Obamacare? Besides the vast increase in government power over us and healthcare, and the increased costs that come with that, not really. Very few of the supposedly uninsured are now insured, and people are still using emergency rooms for primary care.
Dodd-Frank was passed in response to outrage! that bankers made money, as had been Sarbanes-Oxley before it.
In fact, manufactured outrage! seems to be the mechanism by which liberals steal our money and run our lives. How’s that working? Not so good.
President Obama continues to be the Divider in Chief. His crises are just excuses to throw more fuel into the fire of divisiveness and class warfare. The result is that Obama is one of the Presidents who has done the most damage to the nation.
It is really about divisiveness and leadership. It turns out that the President who promised a United States, instead is constantly whining about Republicans saying no to him.
Nobody said that working with 535 people, 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House, would be easy. Nobody offered Obama the job. He asked for it.
A leader doesn’t whine, a leader tries to find ways of uniting people behind him. A true leader would know how to work with enough Representatives and Senators to get the job done without having to demonize those that don’t go along.
Under President Obama, the U.S. has become a country made up of people screaming at each other under his lack of leadership. The fact that he’s ignoring the state of reality and focusing on the divisive has become par for his course.
The last time we were so divided as a people was during the 1960’s, almost 50 years ago. And what caused that? Not really a President (JFK, LBJ, Nixon), but the fact that various trends had evolved over the previous years that finally found a confluence and a violent expression in the sixties: civil rights, the sexual revolution, an explosion of entitlements and a very unpopular war.
Yet our Presidents during the 60’s, all of them, didn’t try to divide us but to unite us. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they failed, but they all tried — two Democrats and a Republican. And perhaps in part due to those efforts, we came through that transformative period relatively intact as a people.
Today we’re facing very different challenges. First we watched as globalization eviscerated a blue-collar middle-class unprepared for unprotected competition, now we’re watching what’s left of it, plus much of the white-collar middle-class, being eviscerated by automation. This is creating a large gap between what high-skilled workers make, which is not at all outrageous relative to what they contribute in value, and low-skilled workers who must compete with hardware and software, and are suffering very badly in the comparison.
Interests are becoming far less shared and far more tribal. And when we need a unifying President most, we have one that for the entirety of his time in office has been one of our most divisive ever.
Voting rights and voting itself are at the heart of all this. No avatar of the right, The Washington Post documents that a solid majority of Americans believes that to exercise a right that depends for its legitimacy on being who you say you are, it’s rational to ask you to prove that you are, indeed, who you say you are.
But that’s not good enough for liberal left, who desperately seek votes under whatever rocks they can find. Doesn’t matter that many of their voters have no concept of the issues or the candidates. Somehow, voting is vindicated if we’re successful at getting out the intellectually challenged vote.
President Obama continues to whine, demonize his opponents, be divisive, and continuously promote class warfare. Somewhere Obama missed the memo that he is supposed to be the President of the whole United States.
Barack Obama has made it clear who he is: The Great Divider. Don’t expect wise moderation from him of the national conversation.
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