He’s popular and well-liked for the same reasons soap actors and moviestars tend to be popular and well-liked — he’s suave and has an easy, effortless charm to him. Relatively young for a president and still the youngest among the former presidents. All presidents are rather awful in their own unique ways, but as far as presidents go, Obama was (and is) one smooth criminal.
Under Obama, there were a lot of people in prisons too. Under Obama, the rich also paid less taxes then they should. Under Obama, wars continued to be fought, human rights and privacy rights continued to be trampled, whistleblowers imprisoned and convicts tortured in Guantanamo… The drone program championed by the Obama administration killed countless people around the world, some of them suspected terrorists, others innocent bystanders and civilians. Much like Bush before him, Muslims could drink the blood of Obama and hated the sight of him — with good reason! — while, curiously, Republicans accused him of somehow being a Muslim.
To his credit, he tried to fix some things, some successfully, other less successfully. He had to deal with a very hostile opposition party that at some point turned him into almost a lame-duck president. Somehow he managed to get his healthcare bill through the senate, which still stands as the biggest accomplishment of his two terms in the White House.
He was far from ideal, but as far presidents go he wasn’t the worst either. He won a Nobel prize by simply getting elected, putting enormous pressure on him to perform enormously well… the expectations for him were sky-high, the first (half) black president and all that. He did not live up to them by a long shot. But isn’t giving a man who was just elected to office a Nobel prize kind of setting him up to fail? Always felt that way to me, anyway.
Obama was a flawed man, as all US presidents to date have been. I do believe on some level he meant well, although he did not always deliver. He did have undeniable charisma and was no where near as abrasive or divisive as what came after him, which made people appreciate him more since he left office. Hell, Trump even retroactively made Dubya Bush palatable to many people.
Image source Facebook
Thanks for Reading
0 Comments