Obama probably the best President during my lifetime

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Astonishingly I will say this without much attempt to back it up with arguments. But I will dismiss all criticism of his tenure as politically motivated.

I would say he and Clinton were my two favorites, but in fact Clinton was President during one of the easiest periods of US history in which to be President. Obama the opposite. He has nothing to apologize for. The only more difficult period in which to be President, that I can remember, was when L. B. Johnson was President. And he went under.

I think Obama is the worst president, and a despicable human being.

Obama set a gigantic precedence with the ACA must-buy-insurance individual mandate.

That was an enormous attack on our freedom.

Now the federal gov. can dictate what we have to buy.

The good news is that his dumb program is failing terribly. Nearly all the exchanges have failed now. The rest are burning though their remaining cash, and are expected to close next year.

Trump says he will undo the mandate so there is some hope.

Gerald Ford did less harm....

Well, I don't really think that he has *done* all that much as a president, so it's quite difficult to evaluate his position compared to past presidents. Much of this is likely due to a strict obstructionist Congress, though...

Obamas greatest achievement is probably the Affordable Care Act, which has likely already saved - and will continue to save - tens of thousands of lives due to the massive drop in the uninsured rate.

Here is the latest overview from Gallup:



Source: http://www.gallup.com/poll/193556/unins ... aign=tiles

The most impressive development is that the uninsured rate has seen the largest drop - as shown above - among low-income households.

Since low-income individuals are - on average - less healthy than high-income individuals, these are also the households most in *need* of health insurance... which makes the unprecedented 10 percentage point drop in the uninsured rate for low-income households in just 2½ years all the more important...

However, the long-term financial viability of the ACA hasn't been secured, so it's difficult to assess its impact on the US in the long run.

Obama has scored achieved some - potentially - significant foreign policy objectives wrt. the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and the nuclear deal with Iran... but these are both very recent, and they risk getting undermined in the future by Republican politicians.

Obama also hasn't been able to reverse the massive budget deficit created by the Bush tax cuts, or managed to achieve stability in the Middle East following the Iraq War. These are of course problems caused by his exceptionally incompetent predecessor, George W. Bush, but this doesn't change the fact that it's the acting president's job to deal with the problems currently facing his or her country...

And if we look at some of the major issues that Obama likely wanted to implement, then it doesn't really look that impressive, either...

- No significant criminal justice reform (especially wrt. the disastrous War on Drugs)
- No significant reform of the educational system (especially wrt. the out-of-control cost of college education)
- No significant immigration reform (especially wrt. pathways to citizenship)

And several of his civil rights victories aren't really his own... Obama may have repealed DADT, but the true champion of LGBT rights is associate justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the two landmark decisions concerning gay marriage (United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges).

So I think we need at least a decade to properly evaluate the impact of the presidency of Barack Obama.

Dammit... Can't edit my post for some reason... ... so I'll have to reply to my own post instead...

The "tens of thousands" figure above refers to the additional lives saved through ACA due to its focus on avoiding medical error... As I demonstrated here...
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=324623&p=7017328#p7017328

... and not due to drop in the uninsured rate... However, similar life-saving effects can be expected given that uninsured Americans have higher mortality - even when controlling for a range of socio-economic and health-related variables:


Source:
Wilper, Andrew P., et al. "Health insurance and mortality in US adults." American journal of public health 99.12 (2009): 2289-2295.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775760/

Bush was the worst for blowing ther biggest moment of national unity since WW2 (I won't go into 9/11 conspiracy theories some of which I am suspicoius of)

As for Obama and the insurence company profit act. Who did it help? the very poor under the age of of 50 but it came at the price of greatly expanding medicaid which is a potential distaster. If you are a person age 55 to 65 a homeowner who was middle class , got screwed bad by the recent depression and could not get back on your feet. If you die the in the goverment can sieze your house because medicaid is a loan not a grant. In fairness estate recovery existed well before Obama but by expanding medicaid he has made so many people more vulnarable and the government potentialy richer. And their is the massive increase in up front costs and people who lost thier plans and doctors. You want to argue that leaving pure private insurence as it was would have worse, maybe you are right but that in be no means makes ACA good thing.

The bailouts temporarily prevented a great depression but postponed the problem for another president to deal with. The fundemantal problems that caused the recent depression such as too big to fail were left in place making it likely that at some point in the future the ponzi scheme known as US economy will collapse and the goverment will not be able to patch it up.

Iran nuke deal same idea, being optimistic it put off the problem to a later date.

The worst thing about The Bill Clinton era was not something you can measure. But the whole cult of celebrity problem that has lead us to Trump really got going in his presidency and he set the tone.

Oh, for Chrissakes! Doesn't it matter to you that millions of people who didn't have medical coverage now do? What good is freedom if you're not alive to enjoy it? I have yet to see the Republicans come up with anything about medical coverage, save to make things harder on the uninsured.

I agree with the OP: Obama is the best President in recent memory, in particular because his immediate predecessor was one of the very worst, rivaled for that spot by James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson.

I don't know about any Republican "savior" on our horizon but I do agree with many of your points.

The ACA is an example. What started as "they will have the same insurance our Congressmen have" degenerated into a gift to major insurance companies.

And (for example) one of the most egregious of Bush's efforts to screw us over was the "can not negotiate for better pricing" pile of spit he pushed in our faces while forcing everyone to buy pharmaceutical insurance......the Dems and Obama had 8 years and democratic control of Congress, yet they did nothing.

He only added more to our national debt than all the previous presidents combined and nothing much has improved as a result . . .

Only because Bush had kept the costs of two wars off the books, whereas Obama did not. In fact, unemployment has gone down, and we're extraditing ourselves from Bush's wars. And of course, Obamacare isn't going to be cost free, but neither is any government program.

Since I reached voting age every President strikes me as worse than the one before. (The starting point wasn't that high to begin with, either.) More authoritarian, more arbitrary, more eager to claim unconstitutional powers, shallower, less intelligent, less decent. With every one I find myself saying, "Well, I thought the previous one was pretty bad, but at least he didn't do X."

I thought we had hit rock bottom with Obama, but both parties are now demonstrating how low we can go. In about two more elections, if the country lasts that long, it'll come down to an actual Nazi vs. a genuine Stalinist.

I'm sorry, but you really think Obama is less intelligent than Bush?!?!
And as much as I dislike Hilary Clinton, she's hardly a Stalinist. And I'd hardly call Trump a Nazi - a Fascist in the Italian tradition, maybe, but hardly a Nazi.

The ends don't justify the means.

Once lost, freedoms are very hard to ever get back, so don't give them up so easily.

The ACA causes harm to millions of people.

It requires them to buy insurance they may not like or may not need.

I was affected personally, as they cut the flexible medical spending account from $5000 to $2500 per year.

The ACA architects were honest, and said the ACA is a screwjob on the young and healthy.

The plan was to screw the young and healthy people into paying for older and sicker people.

However, as we can see, operation screwjob is failing.

That might be a difficult case to make. In that instance let's say "no smarter than."

So you don't dispute the rest of my observations then?



Your reading skills need work.

Yes, they are forcing people who don't need insurance to buy it.

However, that's a negative.

Now these people have to fork over monthly premiums to insurance companies for something they don't need.

They are forcing GEN Y to pay for the health care of the much richer Baby Boomer generation.

I think the young will revolt.