6 ms·
Obama is not a socialist and there is very little that he could do with such strong opposition and control from the GOP in the house, and until recently, the se
by aioprisan 10y ago
Obama is not a socialist and there is very little that he could do with such strong opposition and control from the GOP in the house, and until recently, the senate.
- marknutter 10y agoDidn't Democrats have control of both the House and the Senate for a period? Also, doesn't being the POTUS mean you know how to bridge gaps and compromise? Sounds like a convenient excuse to point fingers at the other side.
- aioprisan 10y agoYou mean all of 2 years out of his 8? Remember the big healthcare reform bill that got passed and the American Recovery Act that prevented the American car manufacturers from closing up shop? What do you know, things can get passed when that party has control, but since then the GOP did everything possible to block all their efforts. So yeah, not much help for those millennials from the GOP.
- marknutter 10y agoPerhaps the reason the Democrats lost their super majority was because they rammed ACA and ARRA down the throats of congress with no bipartisan cooperation. It's hard to get the other side to work with you when you've demonstrated how little their opinions matter to you in the first place.
- aioprisan 10y agoThat's generally the nature of massive reform. It had to be done and there were political costs associated with it, but it was worth it from a net cost and health outcomes perspective. Desegregation was pretty unpopular as well, are you saying that shouldn't have happened either?
- marknutter 10y agoYou're comparing desegregation to the ACA? I'm pretty sure most Democrats are unhappy with the ACA.
- aioprisan 10y agoCare to cite that source? Is this in recent memory or a poll done at the height of ad campaigns being run trying to assuage folks one way or the other? To help you out, here's what the latest June 2016 polling says about Democrats and that ACA: "16 percent of Democrats report an unfavorable opinion, down from 25 percent in April." (http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-june-2016/ http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-heal...)
- marknutter 10y agoI guess what I mean is, when compared to a single-payer system, most Democrats were unhappy with the ACA. I'd be wary of believing any polls about the ACA in general because Democrats likely feel a duty to support it in the face of criticism from Republicans. A much more informative poll would be asking Democrats whether they would have preferred a single-payer system.
- michaelchisari 10y agoThere are decidedly left and right wings of the Democratic Party. He had a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, but he did not have a filibuster-proof majority of liberals.
- marknutter 10y agoDoesn't that indicate his ineffectiveness as a POTUS, though? He couldn't even work with his own party.
- michaelchisari 10y agoPossibly. But I think it moreso indicates that two party systems are actually multiparty systems without any of the benefits of multiple parties. The various factions operate within their party. The Republicans have the same issue, but they're less pronounced.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoI would say the republicans have even more factional problems than the democrats...tea party and trump, moderates, Cristian coalition, etc..! But since they don't control the White House, they are at least unified in there Obama hate, which is mostly how they are perceived.
- michaelchisari 10y agoYou're right, the factional problems of the Republicans are huge this time around. But they weren't so much in 2008.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago2008 basically started the tea party. I would also claim that Democrat factions were pretty subdued before 2008 as well.
- elgabogringo 10y agoObama had filibuster-proof majorities for his first two years (when they passed the ACA with only one republican house vote and none in the senate) then a split congress for four. When measured by party control, Clinton, GHW Bush, and Reagan all faced more opposition in congress than Obama has.
- bullfightonmars 10y agoObama and the Democrats had a filibuster proof majority of the Senate for something like 60 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#S...
- aioprisan 10y agoNone of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, they've only gotten more extreme over the years.
- ktRolster 10y agoNone of the past administrations faced such partisan Congresses, This is unthinking lack of research. You only need to go back to Clinton to find a congress that vociferously was against him, to the point they impeached him. Clinton handled it because he was very good at handling compromise and the politics game.
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- MisterBastahrd 10y agoThe current Congress is the mentally unhinged bastard stepchild of that one.
- ktRolster 10y agoIf you look at the Newt, he was more insane by an order of magnitude than Ryan.