This is a pretty amazing poll result, although it's not exactly something that I'm surprised by. In fact, it's something that I rather expect in the modern political American climate. It's also something that, quite frankly, seems possible only in America today.
This poll suggests that President Obama is the worst president in all of American history (see link below for the entire article):
The Quinnipiac University survey found 33% of American voters named Obama as the worst while 28% named his predecessor, George W. Bush.
"Over the span of 69 years of American history and 12 presidencies, President Barack Obama finds himself with President George W. Bush at the bottom of the popularity barrel," Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.
It is amazing to me how stubbornly so many Americans stick to this false conservatism that people remained willfully blind to the circumstances that allowed the state of affairs in the United States to be so bad. I certainly am not defending President Obama here. To me, I approached him with skepticism from the beginning, not believing the hype surrounding him in the lead-up to the 2008 election and immediately afterward. He has been a disappointing president, but more or less in the same spirit as, say, President Clinton was, back in the nineties. No more, and no less. Both were political opportunists who promised the world with their words, and delivered a de facto endorsement of corporate supremacy disguised as political pragmatism, during their actual presidential administrations. This, after making a career in politics by speaking in grandiose and highly idealistic terms of how much they could change, with a little bit of hope. Both men used those words, specifically.
Yes, President Obama has been a disappointment. He has not really delivered what he promised in terms of environmental protection, although I will make a note of his recent reforms in this field which, while welcome, do not go nearly far enough. He also promised to close Gitmo, but he did not deliver. He seemed like a welcome change from the excesses of the Bush administration but, truth be told, his presidency has almost at times seemed like an extension of those years, in more ways than one.
But that's the thing that people, at least Americans who subscribe to this false conservatism that has swept the nation politically now for many decades, simply need a bit of reminding of. They blame President Obama for everything that they find going wrong with the country, but they remain disingenuous and intellectually dishonest about just how things go so bad in the first place.
Let us remember where so much of these problems started. During the Clinton days, the state of the nation seemed pretty strong. Yet, these false conservatives harped on his getting a blowjob in the Oval Office, and "disgracing" America. So, they opted for a man who promised that he would bring integrity, character, and honesty back into the White House, remember? That man lost the 2000 election, yet was still appointed the presidency by his powerful friends. He spent more time on vacation than probably any other president in history. and eight months into his first term, the biggest security failure in American history took place with the September 11th attacks. He and his cronies in the White House used that tragedy to further their narrow political aims, decreasing rights and liberties domestically, while dramatically increasing illegal government surveillance and control like never before in American history. They aggressively pursued an illegal and immoral war for corporate profit, a war clearly for oil, and lied to the American people systematically while pursuing it with a measure of arrogance that put America to shame around the world, and made many of the same people around the world who had felt sympathetic to Americans following the September 11th attacks, suddenly skeptical of American intentions. Concentration camps opened up, torture was resurrected. There were massive corporate scandals, from Enron to Halliburton to Blackwater, and there was unprecedented government secrecy. During his reelection campaign, people attending one of his events had to take an oath that they were loyal to him, always a dangerous sign. Shortly after truly winning his first presidential election in 2004, his failure to respond adequately during Hurricane Katrina added still further disgrace to his name and presidency, and this time, finally, it was reflected in his approval numbers - from that point, right on to the end of his horrendous time in the White House. The national debt increased dramatically during his tenure. And, last but certainly not least, it was fittingly during his presidency that the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression took place, forcing the then incoming new president, Barack Obama, to borrow a lot of money to get the economy out of the tank.
Yes, we went from being the most powerful country in the world, and with a fairly decent reputation (although not nearly as unblemished as many supposed) to having an economy on the verge of collapse, and a military that had shown it's limitations and weaknesses while stretched too thin across the globe, and fighting wars with questionable intentions. It was also a country that many around the world had learned to distrust, because the collective American reputation it had earned during those eight years of the arrogant swagger of an oil-rich and oil-minded administration.
A lot of American neocons today conveniently forget all of this, and harp only on all of the bad that this has produced, and which President Obama was unable to wave a magic wand and fix automatically and painlessly. But things don't work that way. It was a huge mess that Obama's predecessor made, and it was a long time in the making - a long time that these false conservatives, whether they called themselves neocons or the Tea Party, conveniently seemed to have remained conspicuously silent throughout. They seemed asleep during that time, but woke up on January 20, 2009, to find a black man as president while the country was, for all intents and purposes, in the worst shape that it has been in a very, very long time.
No, I am not impressed with President Obama's job so far. But the problem for me is that he too closely resembles that man that preceded him, and did not go nearly far enough to distance himself from that disastrous approach.
What we could have used, indeed, was someone more similar to the man that Obama pretended to be while candidate - a reformer with enough idealism to think big thoughts, and enough political savvy to at least deliver on some of them, and enough honesty to at least work towards the rest of them. We needed a break from the recent past, from the approach of President Bush and his failed administration.
More specifically, we needed a break from outrageous and illegal government secrecy and surveillance, and away from wars. We needed a complete break from corporate supremacy and the trickle down economic policies that had been proven by then to have caused the two worst economic disasters that Americans had seen in recent times: the Great Depression, and the more recent "Great Recession" that came after eight years of Bush policies in the White House.
Yes, that was what we needed.
But it was not what we got. President Obama's presidency is not the worst in history, but it can certainly be argued to be a failed presidency all the same. Why? Precisely because this administration, for whatever the reason, has not separated itself as completely from the presidency that preceded it as it should have, and decided far too often to follow the practices and policies far too closely of what was truly the worst presidential administration in history: that of President George W. Bush!
Here is the article that got me on this topic. You can click on the link to read it for yourself:
POLL: Obama Worst Modern-Day President by Colin Campbell of Business Insider, July 2, 2014:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/poll-obama-worst-modern-day-111329150.html
No comments:
Post a Comment