Do you think President Obama has done anything useful?

1. 57

   PresenciaNewsposted 13 years ago

   Do you think President Obama has done anything useful?
   
   If yes, give what he has done for this country. If no, explain why he has been a failure.

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2. 68

   onegoodwomanposted 13 years ago

   Shortly after taking office, there was a crisis, hostages taken by Somalian pirates.  He sent the US Navy in for a successful rescue.
   
   That is the sole thing, he has done, that I approve of.

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3. 61

   pueblomanposted 13 years ago

   He has tackled the Zionist lobby in an attempt to confront the middle east question. This is courageous but too big an issue to resolve in his lifetime.
   
   He has gone further than Clinton in trying to resolve the scandal of the American health service. Many Americans don't think that access to universal health care and universal education are lynch pins of a modern democracy. In other words they don't understand what democracy is. So he is on a hiding to nothing.
   
   Both of these issues are huge. Bigger than the political lives of most Presidents. Obama's problem is that he is more intelligent and has more integrity than the people who elected him. This is unheard of.
   
   
   George W. Bush, by contrast, earned for the USA the contempt and derision of the entire world, and Obama scores simply by not being him. So do the American electorate.
   
   Bush bombed women and children from 20,000 feet and declared he'd won a war. Perhaps you regard that as an achievement?

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4. 66

   Brupieposted 13 years ago

   The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPAC, aka the health care bill) will undoubtedly be viewed as a huge accomplishment by future generations.  Much of this bill hasn't taken effect yet, so the beneficial nature hasn't been realized.  Health care in the United States was woefully screwed up.  When middle class families go bankrupt because of a sick family member or must decide between medical care, college or retirement, things are clearly wrong. 
   
   The modest reforms that were enacted, such as prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions are absolutely necessary to a civil society.
   
   The Troubled Asset Relief Program (started under Bush, but greatly expanded under Obama), though broadly criticized, has been extremely successful.  Virtually all of the money has been repaid, and it may even make a profit.  TARP may have looked like welfare for Wall Street, but the financial sector is too large a sector to allow chaos - FDIC might have been drained without TARP.
   
   The war in Iraq needed to end.
   
   The Stimulus package has awarded over $200 billion in grants and loans.  Unemployment may be 9.6%, but this money is roughly $800 for every man, woman and child.   Where would the economy be without this money greasing the wheels?

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5. 64

   Ralph Deedsposted 13 years ago

   President Obama has accomplished an amazing number of things in his first two years in office.
   
   He succeeded in passing a health care reform bill which every Democratic president since Roosevelt tried but failed to do. The reforms aren't perfect, but they are a good start.
   
   He revived the SALT nuclear disarmament talks and the Palestine peace negotiations both of which were neglected by Bush.
   
   As promised he has pulled the combat troops out of Iraq and is attempting to turn the country back over to an Iraqi government.
   
   He pulled the country back from the edge of a bottomless pit of a depression. However, his stimulus package was not big enough to spark more than a sluggish economic recovery. He should have followed Paul Krugman's advice rather than Larry Summers's and other advisers' recommendations.
   
   As promised he has sent more troops to Afghanistan and stepped up the drone attacks against Al Qaida leaders across the border in Pakistan. [I have difficulty with his policy in Afghanistan and wish he had followed Biden's recommendation for a more modest approach.}
   
   He has remedied Bush's breaches in our longstanding policy of separation of church and state.
   
   He has begun to repair relations with our allies and establish a more cooperative policy for dealing with international terrorism by other than military means.
   
   He signed  badly needed banking reform and consumer protection legislation, both imperfect but steps in the right direction.
   
   Much remains to be done, but quite a lot has been accomplished in President Obama's first two years in office.

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6. 66

   Thesourceposted 13 years ago

   He was able to tackle many things.
   
   First, he was able to push the Health care Reform
   Millions were left out of America's Health care system. Healthcare corporations were more interested in profits rather than including the millions who were left out of the system. Harvard study shows that about 45,000 deaths per year have resulted because of this. Millions more suffer in sickness and cannot afford to go to the doctor.
   
   Financial reform is another achievement. Corporations and individuals fill their pockets with money from the public. De-regulations policies and lack of regulations were the root cause for failures in Wall Street and in banking industry. Executives at the top rake in millions of dollars with no justification. While many workers toil with long hours to make less than subsistence. Poverty rates among those these workers are rising.
   
   He has also pushed campaign finance reforms. The present system is simply legalize bribery of politicians from wealthy lobbyist. This is why Washington cannot work efficiently to solve the obvious problems facing the masses. However, the Republicans have rejected this bill. The President has done what he can here.
   
   He has also been pushing for many bills to stimulate the economy.
   However, many opposition groups have prevented some and in some cases cut-back some of these well-founded economic recovery policies.
   Please read my hub on "Government Spending and taxes during recession".
   
   I think this President was courageous in going ahead on some of the biggest systemic problems facing the nation.  He is facing strong opposition backed by wealthy and powerful groups.

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7. 61

   weholdthesetruthsposted 13 years ago

   No.   Not a single good thing.   The health care bill, by any rational measure, is pure insanity.  It will amount to hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of rules and regulations, hundreds of billions in costs in complying with them, and by any business or process analysis, it will severely hamper both the delivery and efficiency of health care services.    It creates SCORES of new agencies and offices, all with the ability to hamper the relationship between the patient and  the doctor.  It is, to be concise, monumentally stupid.   
   
   Aside from that, Obama has done nothing of substance world wide, alienated our friends, emboldened scores of bad guys globally, and failed to advance freedom or liberty anywhere, and actively reduced it here.   His "philosophy" of governance and his "America is the source of all wrong" method of thinking is monumentally ignorant and born of mass stupidity.   
   
   Sadly, Obama is a monument to pop culture:   pointless, mindless, unthinking, unwise, uneducated, ignorant, but with a momentary emotional appeal.   History books will record him as the president with the worst judgement of any in history, with a massive gap between him and the next one.   And since his term is not over, it could record him as being the most fraudulent ever.

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