obama 2012 (?????)

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by cacophony

how can these questions be answered only 2 years into his 4 year term? a better question is if he were up for reelection NOW, would you vote for him blahblahblah.

OK, that's kind of what I meant anyway, but with a small caveat. Executive decisions are such that their vectors are set in motion early, and the effects play out long into the future, like for example invading Iraq, or permitting deep water off shore oil drilling. So its pretty clear that unless the next two years are devoted to redoing everything he's done these past two years, then I think its safe to say that we know what the Obama presidency is going to be.

Originally Posted by cacophony

i think he'd win. "deserve" to win is too loaded to answer, and seeing as there are no republican candidates who have appealed to me recently i'd probably vote for him again.

"deserve" might be loaded but it must be the most important question. Who deserves the presidency is why a lot of people, like myself, voted for Obama in the first place. I found it against my conscience to reward any politician who went with political expediency and supported the invasion in Iraq.

[Sean]

It's always hard to anticipate how the American people will vote, but personally, I think that Obama has been more effective than some here seem to give him credit for. First and foremost, economists generally agree that his administration's handling of the economic crisis they were immediately thrust into likely staved off a far, far worse scenario than we now have. Yet many people still focus almost exclusively on the shortcomings, or that we haven't fully recovered yet as if it was all an abysmal failure. In one article that outlines what the objectively verifiable results have been, they provide a pretty clear analogy:

"The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing."

And while the health care bill that's passed certainly has it's obvious flaws, we still have yet to see a single "death panel" come to fruition, we're not suddenly a communist country as a result, and armageddon did not happen. As a result, public approval of the bill has been on a steady rise, while opposition has been on a steady decline.

Of course there's been far more going on than just these two issues, but I have to get back to work. My point is, whether or not Obama is successful in 2012 will likely depend on whether or not we continue seeing steady, albeit slow, improvements in the economy, etc, and how well he and his campaign team are able to clearly communicate the objective successes they had in his first term in contrast with the relentless rhetoric we constantly hear claiming otherwise.

As a final note, I would agree that finally getting Guantanamo closed would certainly be a good, helpful thing.