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Every president is just a politician who has risen to the top of his/her party. Their success depends greatly on the people they surround themselves with because no one man or woman is qualified to run a super-power alone. They are also limited in what they can accomplish by the numbers of their party in congress, as we have seen. They all make mistakes because they rely on the info they get from the ones they entrust. I was a Clinton supporter for this reason. She had a leg up because her husband did a pretty good job and she had that experience to draw on, but the Obama supporters won the primary and my support immediately switched to him.
I knew there would be problems in his first term. The learning curve takes a while to kick in, so the logical thing to do is to keep people who know the system. That's probably why he wanted Clinton for Sec. of State, Bernanke to head the Fed, and Gates.
I am impressed with what has been accomplished the first two years given that republicans were dead set against letting him have anything! They are masters at using unity to defeat reason.
So, I'm not bailing on the guy because he chose to help the unemployed over calling the republican's bluff. I'm sure his advisors told him that the UI extension and the tax cuts for the middle-class were necessary to keep the economy rolling and avoiding another recession, which would basically spell doom for the dems in 2012. Should he have ignored this advice and gambled on calling the repubs bluff? Many here think he should have. I think it would have been a disastrous move given it would have been based on too many unknowns, ie how long before congress was able to pass the needed stimulus to keep the economy going and would they do it at all since the repubs took the house. We know for a fact the repubs will do most anything to make Obama fail because they have said so.
With little time to do anything before the new congress convenes in 2011, he had to make a decision, and it was a tough one. HE did the right thing, IMO. He opted for keeping the economy rolling forward at the expense of a couple of years of tax cuts for the uber-rich. He gave hope to 2 million people on UI, kept taxes lower for the middle-class, and pissed off a lot of dems who think he should have gambled.
Every gambler I know is a loser. They win a few here and there, but eventually they all lose.
So, you nay-sayers go ahead and bitch. You have a right to do that because you voted for the guy. We may never know how the gamble would have played out, but we do know that rellief for the middle class and those on UI will get extensions if this compromise is passed.
Yeah, the rich got a bonus. They screwed us. What else is new? When have they not done that? Their money always comes from us.
And, they would still get it without the tax cuts. Look at the bonuses passed out amongst the rich. It's just a matter of what means they will use to fleece us. If they can't get it thru tax rates, it comes in fees, or extortion by them holding on to trillions of dollars and not creating jobs. They hold all the aces and face cards, and they know it. It's called capitalism.
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