Obama's the best president that America's had since at least Kennedy, you have to admit.

[AZ Progressive]

Despite all the negative things about Obama (and surely I know of them), for someone who has the executive seat of the American Empire, Obama's actually a pretty good president if you compare him to previous presidents.

Obama's been the nicest president since Lyndon Johnson, in the sense of standing up for LGBT people (when Clinton instead passed DOMA.)

Obama's the only president to have gotten any healthcare reform passed.

Obama's the best president since Carter when it comes to the environment.

While Clinton presided over the best economy since the postwar boom, Obama had to turnaround an almost devastated economy. Even during FDR's term, many millions of people were still unemployed (despite the New Deal efforts) until WWII (the unemployment rate was 23.6% in 1932, and dropped only to 14.6% in 1940, and then to 4.7% in 1942.)

Obama is the most outstanding representative to America since Kennedy (Clinton humiliated the office with the Lewinsky sex scandal, Bush further humiliated it, and I doubt Reagan, Bush I, Ford, Carter and Johnson could be considered better representatives.)

While Obama hasn't stopped the corporate machine from going on its siege against America, neither did Clinton or Carter.

Obama's the firmest president against the Right Wing machine since Kennedy (who was firmer but paid a price for it.)

Obama has also been able to function rather well considering heavy attacks from both the right and the left, with the right being arguably the most severe it has ever been for any president.

As bad as Obama is, it's still a lot better than when Bush was fear mongering America and putting foxes to guard the hen house in so many departments, better than Clinton (who virtually established third way politics and signed into law things like "welfare reform" and NAFTA and bills that deregulated parts of the financial industry that led to the 2008 economic crash), better than Reagan (who championed the war on the 99% by the 1%), and arguably Carter (who, despite having a good heart, did start the deregulation trend, ratcheted up the Cold War, and was a weaker president.)

Lyndon Johnson was certainly better domestically than Obama (standing up for civil rights and the poor), but Lyndon Johnson was also responsible for ratcheting up the Vietnam War, leading to the deaths of 36,540 soldiers between 1965 and 1968 (source: http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html) further leading to the disillusionment of the Baby Boomers with the government.

Also, consider that the President is not a king, and can't pass laws like a dictator issuing decree's, and that the executive office is far less powerful than people think. Obama's had to deal with the most hostile Congress since the Do-Nothing Congress around 70 years ago.

Obama is no FDR, but he's still the best president we have had in the past 50 years. Do you really think we had a better choice in 2008?

[TexasTowelie]

1. Oh, you're going to get it now.

3, 2, 1 ...

K&R

[JaneyVee]

2. Best prez of my lifetime so far.

[treestar]

3. +11111

And LBJ and FDR had better congresses and were white men who didn't have to come up with their birth certificates, so given the challenges, Obama beats them out.

[Unvanguard]

4. Probably the best president since Roosevelt, really.

Though with Truman being competitive.

[dilby]

5. Best President since Clinton.

Sorry but Clinton was an awesome President.

[Unvanguard]

6. Clinton's presidency had a lot of legislation that made things significantly worse

from welfare reform to some of the crime legislation he passed. That hasn't happened under Obama.

[Adrahil]

8. NAFTA? Welfare "reform?"

Don't get me wrong... I think Clinton was a great Pres., but Obama did better with less, IMO.

[dsc]

7. There is a lot to dispute in your post

but my favorite is that Clinton debased the White House with Monica but somehow Kennedy of all people was an outstanding representative of America in that regard. Kennedy had more mistresses than patch hell a mile.

[Vattel]

9. Clinton was better on foreign policy by far. On domestic policy Obama might be a little better.

On balance Clinton wins.

[AZ Progressive]

10. The 90's was not peaceful because of Clinton, Clinton rode the coattails of the end of the Cold War

Also, Clinton pushed for the Kosovo War, which was an illegal and with evidence, later found to be an illegitimate war that may have given inspiration for Bush to do the Iraq War.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200005--.htm

Despite the intensive efforts, the results of “the mass-grave obsession,” as the WSJ analysts call it, were disappointingly thin. Instead of “the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect,..the pattern is of scattered killings,” a form of “ethnic cleansing light.” “Most killings and burnings [were] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA-UCK] had been active” or could infiltrate, some human-rights researchers reported, an attempt “to clear out areas of KLA support, using selective terror, robberies and sporadic killings.” These conclusions gain some support from the detailed OSCE review released in December, which “suggests a kind of military rationale for the expulsions, which were concentrated in areas controlled by the insurgents and along likely invasion routes.”

The WSJ analysis concludes that “NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields’” when it “saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO’s bombs.” NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea presented “information” that can be traced to KLA-UCK sources. Many of the most lurid and prominently-published atrocity reports attributed to refugees and other sources were untrue, the WSJ concludes. Meanwhile NATO sought to deny its own atrocities, for example, by releasing a falsified videotape “shown at triple its real speed” to make it appear that “the killing of at least 14 civilians aboard a train on a bridge in Serbia last April” was unavoidable because “the train had been traveling too fast for the trajectory of the missiles to have been changed in time.”

http://www.salon.com/1999/12/14/kosovo_11/

I was in San Francisco on April 15 when President Clinton told the American Society of Newspaper Editors: “We are in Kosovo because we care about saving lives and we care about the character of the multi-ethnic, post-Cold War world.” And just in case we didn’t get it, he repeated that our military involvement was guided by “the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.”

But Kosovo is fast becoming a state based entirely on ethnicity. According to the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, 150,000 non-Albanians have fled Kosovo since NATO declared victory — the result of what the high commissioner called “a disturbing pattern” of killings, beatings and kidnappings promulgated by Albanians. About as far as you can get from “multi-ethnic, tolerant and inclusive.”

Of the 40,000 Serbs once living in Pristina, only 400 are left; 40,000 to 50,000 Gypsies have fled; the 300 Croats whose families had lived in the province for 700 years left in October for Dubrovnik; and the president of Pristina’s Jewish community fled to Belgrade, condemning the “pogrom against the non-Albanian population.”

The Albanian atrocities are not just going unacknowledged and unlamented — they’re going uninvestigated. The International War Crimes Tribunal is mandated to investigate only crimes committed “during the armed conflict in Kosovo.” And since, according to the NATO powers, the province is now enjoying the fruits of peace, the murderers can go on murdering with impunity. They know that the only retribution they have to fear is from the toothless U.N. police force.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/kosovo/330804.stm

The fact that even supporters of action against Milosevic condemn the air strikes as futile, that Nato has blundered into this campaign like a bull in a china-shop, that its political and military goals change by the week, that it has no United Nations cover to legalise its attacks, that far from weakening Serb support for Milosevic Serbs have closed ranks in face of the bombing, that the campaign is causing the very regional destabilisation it seeks to avoid, all this seem to be blissfully ignored in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn and Brussels, if not perhaps in Athens, Rome, Prague and Budapest.

[Vattel]

12. The campaign in Kosovo was vastly more successful than Obama's military ventures.

Your last quote and link don't help your case since it was written before the end of the war and falsely predicts that the airstrikes would be futile.

I do like the irony of Chomsky relying on the WSJ to attack the campaign in Kosovo.

[AZ Progressive]

11. Also, add to this that Obama may be the biggest truth teller since Carter

Obama's been more willing to tell hard truths than anyone since Carter.

[Doctor_J]

13. no I don't

[KingCharlemagne]

14. Carter helped broker the Camp David Accords (the Israeli-Egypt peace). Nothing President

Obama has done (or not, as the case may be) comes remotely close to that. America really fucked up when it elected Reagan in 1980.

[fadedrose]

15. I think he is the best

Last edited Sun Mar 22, 2015, 11:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Some Democrats who may be considered are here:

http://www.toptencandidates.com/home.html

But they don't list Jim Webb.

I hope the next president is a good speaker. Obama has me spoiled. I could listen to Sanders, and Warren holds my interest.... Can't remember Webb.

A president should be a good communicater as well as do good stuff.

[dolphinsandtuna]

20. Webb is a mysogynist

I'm not forgetting that.

[Stardust]

16. I second that emotion!

[bobGandolf]

17. I agree....and it's eating the racist repugs alive. n/t

[NaturalHigh]

18. Well, no I really don't have to admit that.

Bill Clinton was much better in my opinion. Hillary Clinton would have been better too.

[dolphinsandtuna]

19. No

Jimmy Carter was much better. As to Clinton, he was a disaster for jobs, ex: free trade.

[anotojefiremnesuka]

21. The best Democratic President for the 1% is more like it.

Having been politically aware since JFK, your assertion is totally off the mark.

But we are all entitled to our own opinions aren't we.

[AZ Progressive]

22. You think Carter and Clinton are better?

Carter signed into law the following

Airline Deregulation Act

Motor Carrier Act of 1980

Staggers Rail Act

Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978

Carter continued the trend of deregulation that Ford started and that Reagan later championed.

A salute to Carter, deregulation's hero




Bill Clinton put the DLC / Third Way politics on the map. Clinton legitimized the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, as well as the Democratic Party's move to the right. Obama has been functioning in the party that Clinton promoted.

Clinton also signed into law the following:


- Telecommunications Act of 1996: Led to Clear Channel and Cumulus to buy up radio stations across America and promote Rush Limbaugh and other hate radio talk show hosts, as well as the spread of right wing propaganda across America.

- NAFTA: Need I say more?

- Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: Repeal of Glass-Steagall, allowing banks like Bank of America to get involved in the securities market and put federally guaranteed funds on the Wall Street casino.

- Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: Literally created the unregulated derivatives market, and the literal explosion in size of the derivatives market, which was one of the key reasons for the 2008 crisis. As of May 2014, its size is about $710 Trillion dollars, far more than the size of the world economy. Derivatives are insurance like contracts officially but were used as merely betting instruments by Wall Street leading up to the 2008 crisis.

[RichGirl]

23. I totally agree and history will prove it.

Too bad he doesn't get the love now.