What exactly is Obama responsible for?

I mean aside from his gigantic health care bill that will likely be found unconstitutional?

We are told that spending from tax cuts that ran during his term or renewed during his term are not really part of his deficit spending.

We are told that the Volt began two years before his terms and that Bush initiated the bailouts of automakers and banks.

Programs that generated the Solyndra scandal, sorry those are from Bush as well.

Iraq war, helped continue the Bush time table for ending it.

Afghanistan war, doubled down on it but none of the spending on that really counts toward Obama because he didn't start it.

The stimulus, not really Obama's because they reopened the last year of the Bush terms and inserted the spending into that fiscal year.

What exactly has President Obama done to claim responsibility for in four years and to deserve reelection when everything else was the started by, continued from or a left over responsibility of everyone else?

The first example it gave me was increase fuel economy standards starting four years after he is defeated this fall or after he leaves office from a second term.

The second example was to launch a website, Recovery.gov to track his completely ineffective stimulus.

Reelect me and you won't get jobs, but you will get a website to see who I paid off to get reelected!!!

Another one, pass the stimulus, only that spending wasn't his and really, it started with Bush, and...well... you sort of get the point. Only maybe you don't since everything that hasn't worked really wasn't done by Obama.

The next example... he issued an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay, how has that worked out?

Really, someone needs to try a hell of a lot harder.

Tackled it by crafting (likely) unconstitutional legislation that will cost twice as much as TOUTED per the Washington Post fact checker.

A couple points, first the majority of all tea party folks I've encountered, the majority of the signs in that very pointed picture and the majority of all literature I've read deals largely with strengthening fiscal restraint within the Republican Party. I've said that the Perot Party and Libertarians are largely conservative but don't always vote Republican and that is what I believe the Tea Party mostly represented.

Now the second point is that I've no idea where you get that the main focus of clear push of the Tea Party involved Medicare. I have no doubt there are some parts of the country where it could have played out that way or perhaps where Republicans injected that message into their campaign.

So finally we get to the final point, what is happening with Medicare and who will do what with it. Obama wants to extract savings from Medicare. Now the true point is it needs to be cut PERIOD. However Obama is seeking to cut it while throwing vast sums of money into Medicaid and increasing the eligibility there to 133% of the poverty level.

That makes the case pretty easy to show that it isn't about shared sacrifice and instead is about purchasing votes from different people.

I've not seen a Republican proposal that calls for cuts but at the same creates new entitlements. Could a certain percentage of people still be ticked off about that the proposed cuts like in the Ryan budget? Sure they can but the reality is that we need shared sacrificed to get to a balance. That doesn't preclude anyone from playing politics though and if Obama to make such obvious moves as declaring we are cutting while radically expanding spending to the tune of trillions, then people aren't going to associate him with hope and change and instead will associate him with trickery and deception.

As for my personal position, I've declared that the Laffer curve does indeed work and is sound economic theory but that we aren't on the wrong side of it right now and that Bush and any other Republican are wrong to take people off the tax rolls. Obama could have just let it expire but instead he wanted to tax the rich so he had to extend it to everyone to get more unemployment benefits. Letting it expire, letting folks suffer with only almost two years of unemployment and having everyone pay a bit more would have actually been a very prudent thing. He didn't do it though.

I also said that if he had spent the entire stimulus building safe nuclear power plants he would have easily been reelected (Not sure you were here for that.) Finally I said if he stopped Pax Americana and actually attempted to bring a large number of troops home to create a true peace dividend and spent it on just expanding existing medical programs that service those without that he wouldn't have had much of a problem. He obviously didn't do that either. I say these things because they would have been great positions and would be easy to portray as a third way. Nuclear power in modern reactors is safe and would help get us off oil. Ending America as empire and taking troops out of Europe and parts of Asia can still easily be accomplished. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would have easily associated him with Clinton in terms of tax rates and also didn't cost any political capital. I mention these also because the claim is that Republicans want the president to fail and that isn't true. I don't want anyone to fail but if they are a hard partisan with hack solutions, and that is what Obama has proven to be, then they will fail regardless of what I want or hope.


It isn't the only viable course and having the narrow view that anyone who disagrees with you is a liar or stupid is an extreme position.