Bangee5 wrote:
Let's hope that the damage that Obama has done can be corrected by the Next Republican President.
You can hate Obama, as Republicans do, but that hate is irrational and harms you and your own understanding, and there is little any rational person can accuse Obama of that is damage.
From today's column by Timothy Egan, and it's impartial enough for me:
"By any objective measurement, his presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelts time. Ronald Reagan certainly competes with Obama for that claim. But on the night of Reagans final State of the Union speech in 1988, when he boasted that one of the best recoveries in decades should send away the hand-wringers and doubting Thomases, the economic numbers were not as good as those on Obamas watch.
At no time in Reagans eight years was the unemployment rate lower than it is today, at 5 percent and this after Obama was handed the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Reagan lauded a federal deficit at 3.4 percent of gross national product. By last fall, Obama had done better than that, posting a deficit of 2.5 percent of G.D.P.
(Snip)
Much of the country is now more openly intolerant, quick to hate and nasty. One reaction to Obama has been the rise of an opposition party that is a home for xenophobes, defeatists and alarmists. They are the Eeyore Party with a snarl. As we heard again during the Republican debate on Thursday, Obamas opponents are drawn to the siren call of the angriest voices, as Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina artfully put it.
(Snip)
Could Obama, with that first-class intellect to go with a first-class temperament, with that pitch-perfect sense of humor, have been a better schmoozer and deal maker? Certainly. He was never very good at hiding his condescension for Republican leaders. But that party was united in a single goal to defeat him at every turn.
Republicans who would not applaud the creation of 14 million jobs, an unemployment rate cut in half, 17 million people given health care, a global climate change pact, the strongest military in the world and a rousing call for a moonshot to cure cancer are incapable of taking a fair measure of Obamas achievements."
I rest my case, and suggest you re-evaluate yours.