Obama points to his many accomplishments. But no one cares. Which is why he got his ass kicked in the 2010 midterm elections.
So Many Accomplishments
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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2012 will be a fun year, won’t it? We’re probably still a good decade or two away from any real leadership
In ’94, everyone said Clinton got his ass kicked and was definitely going to be a one-term president.
As it turned out, Clinton was wildly popular with the voters, and would be president today were it not for term limits, but he had absolutely no coattails. It wasn’t Clinton who got his ass kicked in ’94, it was only the Democrats in Congress. Who got their asses kicked again in ’96 while Clinton sailed to an easy victory.
In other words, there’s no way of telling from the mid-term what people really think of Obama, since they weren’t voting for Obama.
So will Obama prove to be another Clinton, or another Bush, Sr???
Who knows? 2012 is a long way away. Obama still has a chance if he starts working on the economy, and only the economy. But I don’t think he will.
2010 is a very different economic environment than 1994. Obama came into office right as the economy went into a free fall, and not years afterward like Roosevelt. I think he has a pretty good chance of winning re-election, simply because NOT winning re-election is actually a pretty rare thing. I also don’t think the GOP is structurally capable of producing a viable national candidate right now.
That isn’t to say Obama’s administration is going to do anything. I don’t think he will. Our options in 2012 will be awful and awfuller.
I think you should start posting your hate mail Ted, things seem a little quieter around here.
I could do that. I have enough to start an extra tab on the blog.
I can’t say I miss a birther troll preaching to me about the evils of Obama.
I’m surprised Obama got away with saying healthcare would be expanded “with hard work” in the future “like civil rights”. At first I was alarmed that some of his cabinet were avid fans of Cass Sunstein and Elinor Ostrom (a sure sign Obama was surrounding himself with “legitimate” and “level headed” zombies.
Both writers are just so incurious and incorrect about how captured our system is. Ostrum thinks corporations can be incentivised to do the right thing. The common pool resource (CPR) framework is her main area of interest. It’s this lame idea where you get all players involved to understand that conserving the resource is in everyones interest, and you arrange a system where everyone plays nice without too much regulation.
I was forced to study it under one of her disciples a few years ago. I got a 1.0 because in my paper, I simply dismantled CPR, and proposed adoption of the only known successful environmental policy approach : Command and Control.
Surprise surprise. Corporate violators respond to police more than they respond to incentive. (see Europe).
So when Obama came out and said recently that healthcare would need to be expanded (presumably through a mandate and sue approach), I was not shocked. I’m just shocked that he has been allowed to get away with saying we have civil rights as a result of “hard work”. How about this?: civil rights took 100 years longer than the rest of the world because conservatism is built into the constitution (see auxillary precautions). (for Pete’s sake, Mexico outlawed slavery before we did!)
Oleg either you had a crappy teacher, or you didn’t do a very good job. I wasn’t there so I can’t say either way. However, any student of mine who effectively dismantles a theoretical perspective (at least, one that hasn’t already been deconstructed for 100 years already) gets an A for critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is far more important than any of the minutia they would normally learn in a course.
Yes, I agree that conservatism is built into the constitution as well. I find the structure of our election system to be most similar to Pre-WWII Germany. They too had a very conservative constitution set up by the Junkers to ensure nothing changed. They later had an electoral system set up that (like ours) excessively overrepresented rural areas, leading to right wing extremism as opposed to what you got in Britain and France. Here, the two-senator per state system is largely responsible for a lot of our idiocracy.
Well, she was very young, and I was not there very often either 🙂 I think she had it out for me because I corrected her about Three Mile Island being not the only nuclear incident in US history. There were innumerable meltdowns in the hills outside my hometown hundreds of times the magnitude of the Three Mile Island incident (see SSFL). I think the fact that no one knows about that incident raises the possibility that there are countless similar secret disasters. I am not necessarily anti-nuclear. But lets just say congress was about to enact major energy legislation including provisions for nuclear power. Fossil Fuel industry think tanks i’m sure have a list of nuclear meltdowns and report outlines set aside for the occasion, and an accompanying media blitz. The resulting fallout could provide the leverage needed to gut the bill of nuclear, AS WELL AS some other things, if not kill the bill outright.
She wanted to turn out a class full of nuclear Ostromites, not critical thinkers. Her narrative was very 90s. It was about cooperation and incentives. Very dated. Very now 🙂
Getting back to “auxiliary precautions” and the “cooling plate”. I did not know that about Germany. their history is increasingly relevant to me. I have a tendency to compare Germany in particular to the US. I was knocked over by what I found in the museums. My fav poster was one of a bunch of Bolsheviks and Jews beating up a German soldier with a shockingly Uncle Sam look on his face. The hatred of Jews was matched only by the hate of marxism. The inescapable conclusion about Germany is that it had to be destroyed. Instrumental rationality was too ingrained in the people (as it is here) and it had to be beaten out of them (as it does here).
On the city scale, Berlin offers hope to dwellers of sprawling cities, like myself that where there is a will there is a way.