Posted by tangplay on 9/17/2018 11:50:00 AM (view original):
Posted by strikeout26 on 9/17/2018 11:41:00 AM (view original):
Posted by tangplay on 9/17/2018 11:18:00 AM (view original):
re the Obama argument, I largely agree with what LB said. Obama was, at the very least, a good figurehead leader. He still is. I can't say the same of our current President, or, to a lesser extent, the one before Obama.
Obama was intentionally divisive. He was probably the most divisive president we have had politically and racially prior to Trump. Bob is a smart man, but he was wrong about this.
Examples?
On climate change, many Republicans supported action on climate change before 2008, and the general consensus was that climate change is a major problem in America. Post-2008, something magically changed. I don't think that that is on Obama. I blame McConnell and his flunkies for making cooperation impossible. Obama played a part as well.
He unleashed Biden who said Romney would put black people back in chains. In a July 2016 poll, nearly 70% of Americans agreed that race relations are generally bad, a level unseen since the 1992 Rodney King riots.
Economic indicators actually suggest that things worsened under Obama, among them: the largest wealth gap between blacks and whites since 1989 and record levels of black child poverty.
But the 2012 campaign vs. Mitt was brutal from Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.