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> Sorry, I'm going to disagree here. My generation worked our asses off getting Obama elected, and was really the driving force behind his election (to my shame
by mkr-hn 13y ago
> Sorry, I'm going to disagree here. My generation worked our asses off getting Obama elected, and was really the driving force behind his election (to my shame). Yet, as soon as he's in office, all his promises to us, all his soothing words, all his assurances of change, were out the window. Other than some lame alternative to single-payer health insurance, and (only after major prodding) some gay rights advances, he's become George Bush II.
I noticed this during the two-year campaign. People would ascribe views and assertions to him that simply weren't true. He always took moderate to conservative positions on things. As far as I can tell, he's done or tried to do just about everything he said he would.
My advice would be to pay attention to what candidates are actually saying and not rely on second-hand takes from blogs and poorly-sourced news reports. That's what I did, and nothing surprised me. I knew Obama would be a modest improvement over the status quo, and that's what I got. He was the best of a lot of bad options.
And stop skipping non-Presidential elections.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWhile he did run as a centrist technocrat, Senator Obama had indeed made some nicer mouth-noises about civil liberties.
- _delirium 13y agoYeah, apart from the general aura of "change", the only really concrete things I remember were health-care reform, and closing Guantanamo. At least one of the two did happen, sort of.
- jnbiche 13y agoFirst, up to now, I never skipped non-Presidential elections. And for the record, and to assuage the concern of commenters elsewhere, I do still vote in local elections (and did yesterday, even). Second, I did pay close attention to what the candidates were actually saying. See my comment below for an excerpt from Obama's formal 2008 platform on civil liberties, which he explained repeatedly throughout the campaign (and has now broken repeatedly). My mistake was 1) trusting a politician 2) voting for a politician without a lengthy voting record. So there was no way to quantitatively verify many of his promises.
- mkr-hn 13y ago> See my comment below for an excerpt from Obama's formal 2008 platform on civil liberties, which he explained repeatedly throughout the campaign (and has now broken repeatedly). "Below" is meaningless in a comment thread where posts swap places constantly. Can you be more specific?
- jnbiche 13y agoSorry, I meant this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682813