Remember, the MA Democratic party chose Martha Chokeley to run for governor after she lost the senate race to Scott Brown 4 years earlier. She's probably short-listed for the 2020 presidential nomination. You just gotta stick with talent like that.

I fully agree.

There is zero reason to have that R after your name in 2018.

What's really bat**** bonkers about Phil Scott (Republican VT governor):
Democrats - 61% approve, 31% disapprove
Republicans - 41% approve, 56% disapprove

so obama still ****ing sucks

I expect this comes as much or more from being a party loyalist than a centrist and there is an entire team putting this list together, a team that works for the party.

Obama was trending good towards the end of his term but yikes ever since he left office... No Jealous is a ****ing huge one, there's no explanation for that at all.

I've said it multiple times and I will say it again, Obama was nothing special. He was weak and rarely exercised leadership. I disdain Trump, but atleast he gives to his base - the people who voted for him. Obama rarely gave us red meat.

Watching him constantly get rolled by Republicans and taking it was like watching your best friend going back to his girlfriend who cheats on him. "She's gonna change this time man, she swore to me. I love her!"

Trump gives his rich person base what they want, but he's making things much worse for about 90% of the people who voted for him.

Obama was one of the best presidents ever, which sadly is not much of a compliment.

Surprised you'd say this considering your views on war, etc. (which is certainly Obama's biggest failing). Is he in your top 5?

in practice, what difference is there?

if he looks like a useless centrist turd, walks like a useless centrist turd, and endorses candidates like one, that's what he is. if he secretly still harbors leftist politics but refuses to rock the boat, which is what you are kind of implying(?)...that's still terrible? probably worse.

Obama was very naive during his first term. He thought he could be some kind of bridge between the two sides when the truth was that the Reps made it a moral principle not to sip tea with the enemy. So he never used the leverage he had to further the party interest.

He accelerated the growth of the surveillance state. He stood down from the NRA after Sandy Hook. He failed to tackle income inequality. He got involved in Libya. He didn't punish the bankers who exploited people with **** credit. He never got around to closing Guantanamo Bay prison.

That's not to say he was all bad. Compared to his predecessors and his successor, his 8 years was almost scandal free. The economy turned around under his watch. He normalized relations with Cuba. He passed what could have been a step towards universal health care until it was repealed.

When people like the PSA lot blow Obama (especially Dan Pfeiffer in his book), it's pretty infuriating. He wasn't that great. Better than any POTUS we had in quite a while but not historically good.

Troop count in Iraq and Afghanistan went from like 200000 to like 10000 under Obama. Libya sucked. He chose his first SoS badly (party loyalist that he is), but did better with his second SoS.

And then the question becomes who was better? Even Jimmy Carter's hands were quite dirty as POTUS.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-hands/377364/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo..._of_East_Timor

So, GOAT POTUS, at least as far as this kind of thing goes, is damning with faint praise.

And, it's hard to compare across eras, ranking is hard in general, and some were better in some ways and worse in others, but if you asked me to bring back any POTUS to life and vote for them now allowing them to live in modern times for a while (like pretty obviously Jefferson will not be pro-Slavery), and I'm no expert on all presidents, but I'd put him in the top 5 for sure.

To understand how disappointing Obama was, just imagine what the GOP would do with the house, presidency and 59 senate seats.

It was very obvious from Inauguration Day Reublicans were bad faith actors.

Probably enough blame to spread around to some Democratic senators also. I don't recall if it was mainly the Senate or if blue dogs in the house were also a problem for things like the public option to the ACA.

It was one senator (Joe Lieberman)

I think Obama did what he thought he could while still being able to be come across as a very serious person to the Washington Post et al. I know his actions were not all awesome, but I'm not sure how much better was even possible.

Ok?

Lotta good the whole "preserve the filibuster norm" did the country.

If you believe the worst notions floating around about Russian interference in the 2016 election (e.g., he knew the problem was drastic and extent but got threatened or was terrified Mitch McConnell et al would pitch a huge fit if he was more publically alarmist about it), then Obama's naivete and disastrous accomodationist approach with the GOP continued right up until he left office.

FWIW personally I assume Russian interference narratives are generally overblown and post-hoc rationalizations and that's why Obama wasn't explicit about the problem ante-hoc, BUT if Democrats who are really animated about Russian interference want to tell a coherent story then they need to come to grips with whatever the **** Obama's role was because the status quo explanation ("well he kinda knew because TWENTY THREE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES did, but he didn't say much because he was terrified Mitch McConnell would be mad so he let Donald Trump get elected by Russian stooges") is bizarre and speaks incredibly ill of him.

I seem to recall there being more opposition than that. Googling finds stuff like this which talks about it only having 43 firm yes votes in the Senate, and being opposed by some house democrats (while also talking about it as a failure of leadership from Obama).

This is tangential to the main point about Obama not being progressive of course. I was just thinking a GOP congressional supermajority might be more ideologically aligned than the 2009 Dem supermajorities.

The thing is Republicans used their majority to cement in future Republican dominance. They play the long game. Democrats passed ACA, which is good, and did give Democrats a lead in people's minds about Democrats wanting to help people. But Obama didn't understand the new rules of the game. There's evidence that he didn't give much weight to placing new judges and put it on the back burner until it was too late. That's just one example.

It's much more brutal now. If you have a supermajority you have to ram everything you can in to get them passed. Democrats still have fancy play Wing Wing syndrome instead of getting back to brutal political basics. Change the rules of the game so that you have it as easy as possible to govern and give your constituents what they want and as much of it as possible with the full knowledge that if your opponents win elections those things will be taken away.

I think it's more than that. It's not just Obama, or other congressional Democrats, not understanding the game. It's that they don't have the same goals as the more progressive posters in this forum. I guess if I have any point at all it's just that the problem (from a progressive standpoint) isn't just that Obama wasn't progressive, it's that the Democratic party establishment in general isn't progressive. Obama wasn't an outlier in that regard, nor was Clinton.

I think this is accurate and fair but then you can criticize Obama for lacking the political vision and leadership to use his position, his popularity, political standing / capital, whatever to insist on a more progressive and durable set of policy outcomes. "My party is pretty heterogeneous and we're faced with rabid right-wing opposition who will roll this all back at the first opportunity ...so better go with the incrementalist and accomodationist transient approach that is so tenuous a party led by a senile game show host will be able to undo pretty quickly" seems like a transparently bad approach. But that WAS exactly the state of the game and how it played out, so you have to assume Obama missed at least one of those variables.

You could alternatively argue Presidents don't matter much, which fine, I'll buy that, but then this debate becomes increasingly meaningless. He's just a leaf in the wind subject to meta forces out of his control like everything else, fate is a cruel mistress, etc.

Oh yeah, I think there's plenty of valid criticisms to make of Obama's choice to prioritize appealing to WaPo pundits over winning political battles, and that's true probably from both a progressive or more centrist liberal perspective. I just don't think that's the entire story.

FWIW I suspect that Obama wrongly internalized some of the Permanent Democratic Majority and Fukuyama's End of History style stuff such that the cosmopolitan pluralist liberalism ideals were entrenched and forever, and he favored an incremental approach with maximum accommodation to the GOP because he assumed a lot of the rest could come later once the GOP's political standing became untenable.

I *think* if you sort of listen to the narrative and tone of how Obama and Democratic leadership describe the era, you get that sense, that they thought this was sort of Step 1 to a more progressive country and we'd do single payer in a decade or so once all the truly regressive Boomers died off, and the arc of justice is long but we'll all get there eventually.

Yeah, I recall hearing people voice that kind of expectation. Goes along with the whole "tragic death of the GOP" thing.

32 trillion over 10 years.

Also the UK spends more like 191 billion as of 2016 according to a quick Google, and it was going up at 3% per year, so probably more like 202 billion this year. And oh, wait, that was in pounds... Currently 1 pound = 1.3 dollars. So make that 263 billion.

We have 4.96 times as many people, which makes it 1.3 trillion per year. Suddenly instead of the US spending ~50 times as much per person under a Medicare for All plan, it would be less than 2.5 times as much.

But wait, it's even less significant of a gap. Due to inflation, year one of the 32 trillion calculation should be the cheapest, and we didn't even add inflation for next year to the calculation on the UK's costs.

Lastly, there's probably way less rationing of care under Medicare for All than under the NHS... But I could be wrong about that.