Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Bottom line to me is that the comparison's to Bush are a smoke screen and nothing more. Each president handled different situations.
My problem with Obama right now is that he seems to be throwing trillions of dollars at the economic situation without a lot of foresight or due diligence.
I don't agree with the concept that you can merely spend your way out of a recession while peddling a message of hope, it just seems to be the solution that people want to hear and see, and personally I think its a bad plan.
That and Obama seems to be doing a lot of back peddling on multiple situations and his handling of foreign policy seems to be a example of more McCain solutions then his own.
I agree that its a bit too early to be judging an entire presidency, but I think he's had a below average start.
|
Well, spending did work out pretty well for FDR--but in a way, that's neither here nor there. What FDR undertook was a massive re-organization of American entitlements, so it's not surprising that it had a stimulative effect. Obama's stimulus may well be too small, but I think it's pretty clear that the fiscal-conservative-supply-side-ists are pretty much out in the cold right now, and with good reason: after all, John McCain and Lindsey Graham's fingerprints are all over the emendation to the 2001 Omnibus bill that arguably caused the whole mess by deregulating exotic financial instruments like credit default swaps.
However, Obama isn't really after the kind of big sea-change in the way government works that FDR did, but instead increasing spending in hundreds of separate areas. If you want to argue that this might be the wrong approach, I think you'd probably have an argument. But saying "let's keep trying fiscal conservatism. It might start working, for some reason" is the sort of magical thinking that lost John McCain the election. Cutting spending is a recipe for a deeper recession, and most people understand that at the moment. The problem is that spending SHOULD have been kept under control when the economy was doing well, though admittedly that takes the sort of foresight that term-limited politicians aren't generally known for.
So--I actually (for all that HOZ claims I'm somehow "defensive" about it
) am not in love with what Obama has done so far, but not because I think that he isn't living up to his promise. In fact, anyone who paid attention during the campaign knows that Obama is being exactly the kind of president that he seemed like he would be: pragmatic, cautious, humble and careful. All of these are positive qualities until they become flaws, but that's the nature of politics, I guess.
For better or worse, Obama's success or failure as a president will be measured by the economy. If, in two years, the economy is still languishing with no sign of improvement, he'll go down in history as an overly-cautious Hoover-type, too measured to take the kind of drastic action that the situation called for. If things look better, he'll go down as more of an FDR-lite, not responsible for loads of new entitlements, but given credit for shepherding the country out of recession.
In the end, neither is particularly fair: my own view is that the President usually deserves less of the blame and less of the credit for the economic situation than he usually gets--but that's the way it's been in U.S. politics at least since "It's the economy, stupid" and perhaps before.