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Originally Posted by Rococo
I certainly agree that Obama comes off looking bad in the WaPo story, but the correct course surely seems clearer in hindsight than it did at the time.
I don't think Obama refrained from stronger action because he was worried that Republicans were going to call him mean names. Any black man who runs for President as a Democrat has thick skin. Nor do I think that he was mainly motivated by some innate sense of fair play.
I think he wanted Hillary to enter the presidency in as strong a position as possible and thought a relatively low key response was the right way to achieve that goal. In other words, I think he was trying to be pragmatic. The error was that he badly misjudged the likelihood of Trump winning. He made the same mistake we all made.
I agree, and it's also important to keep in mind that we don't know how it would have played out if Obama had done something after not getting the support of the GOP half of the Gang of Eight. Like, he could have actually given Trump enough ammo to win the election without the Russian meddling. If Obama took action against Russia, and tried to force states to secure their election systems even if they didn't want to, Trump would have been blasting him at every rally for rigging the election for Hillary, and that might have gotten Trump more votes.
It put Obama into an absurdly difficult spot when the Republican leaders shrugged and said whatever. I think blaming him for this is both unproductive and slightly unfair (he was POTUS, he could have done better, so it's not out of bounds to question what he did)... But again, it's unproductive. Donald Trump is president, Mitch McConnell is about to **** over America again, and Democrats are wasting time criticizing Obama?