The Big Obama Administration Thread

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So you're already familiar with the notoriously unfunny Day by Day, I see?

 

NOG,

The Senate has already announced that it will not vote on this bill before the August recess. They don't come back from the August recess until after Labor Day, so I'd hazard a guess at having a good two months before we see anything get done on this.

 

I think there is a very low chance that anyone of the public will actually bother to read through the 1000+ page reform.

 

Without meaning to be too critical I swear ever since the Democrats have taken over the Presidency and the Congress their supporters have lost all semblance of a sense of humor.

 

You're wrong, Snook. Most of us never had a sense of humor to begin with.

 

Or, that the comparison to a not-paricularly-good movie from several years ago simply wasn't that funny. It actually took me a little while to remember what movie they were referencing - the second matrix movie has to be at least 5 years old, if not more. Or maybe I just don't get the comic strip. I get comparing Obama to the guy who created the matrix, but Neo is replaced by this red-haired chick who is supposed to be whom? Is she just a standard character in the comic? And if so, does she usually talk to presidents who are supplanted as super villians in sci-fi movies? Do people like Drew, DR, and myself not "get it" because we don't understand the comic (in addition to supporting Obama), or are you suggesting you have to NOT like Obama to get the comic?

 

Well, that's good news, though I still think the public should be made aware of at least the general principles of the plans that are being proposed before anything get's completely finalized. I understand not wanting to heavily discuss something that may change any minute, but at the same time not revealing it until it's already on the books is kind of too late in my book.

Overall, I have no problem with Congress being more-or-less translucent (i.e. hard to get details on all proposed bills unless you're in the know), because most bills won't radically affect the day-to-day lives of the entire US. This has the chance to, and so I'd like to see some effort to actually discuss this with the common public (who, yes, are generally unwilling or unable to comprehend 1000+ pages of the most obscure legallese imaginable).

 

Personally I think the comic is simply written way too seriously to be funny. There is no humour except perhaps for the theme, everything else seems to be deadly serious. To me it seems more like an opinion piece written in comic format, than a comic which is supposed to be humorous in any way. It's reasonably well written otherwise though.

 

Oh stop. Simply stating that Day by Day is notoriously unfunny predates the Obama administration by several years. I don't mean "unfunny" because it knocks Democrats (I could care less), but "unfunny" because it's a lame cartoon strip and isn't funny. Muir tries way too hard and usually misses his mark. My comment was a reference to the all-too-common criticism of Chris Muir and his lack of even a basic understanding of the issues he lampoons, yet his conservative fans don't seem to care since he's knocking liberals. Chandos' comment about your post was more or less illuminating an instance of exactly that. The cartoon you posted wasn't that bad, though.

 

Maybe it was because I've seen the 2nd Matrix movie recently that I enjoyed it so much. It struck me as a clever parody.

 

Well, I hadn't heard of Obama's "red pill, blue pill" speech, but given that he invoked the image I'd say it's fair game for pundits lampoon. I didn't really get the comic because I pretty well gave up on the whole Matirx stuff after the first movie -- I liked the film but never thought it was as drop dead fantastic as some of my contemporaries.

I kind of think it's sad that some people are trashing Obama so badly right now -- I don't think he ever made himself out to be the demigod that others hyped him up to be, and now that it's "coming to light" that Obama doesn't have a magic wand with which to fix the myriad problems in the world, people are acting all surprised. He's one man, and even the greatest of men need time to solve enormous problems.

I cannot imagine anyone doing a significantly better job of running the US at this point in time. Sure, he's making some mistakes, but so far I don't see any major honking blunders.

 

Meh. The Colbert Report made essentially the same joke -- except Colbert did it first and he was funny.

 

Exactly. There's plenty of funny and biting Obama satire out there. JibJab, Colbert and South Park have provided some of the best so far. I enjoy satire poked at public figures I like when the lampooning actually makes sense. In order for Day by Day to be funny you generally have to already agree with his BS premise (i.e., Obama's supporters think he's the messiah, liberals celebrate when US troops get killed, etc.). Funny? I guess.

 

I was reading today's (7/27/09) Rasmussen daily report and I came across all sorts of interesting results

Considering he started at +28 that is kind of scary. I'm curious how big of a swing Bush had over his 8 years. I'm guessing he would have been happy to only drop 38 points.

I've seen a lot of discussion in this thread that Obama is a moderate. Is this a result of the GOP smear machine or is it accurate? It is more than possible that the 48% are Republicans.

I feel for him on this issue. Whoever briefed him on it should be fired. The only acceptable answer was to say he was too busy running the country to worry about an arrest in Cambridge. I think Biden could have answered the question better.

Not a big surprise, the country is basically 50/50 Dem to GOP

This is promising, although I am curious about that unchanged 8%.

I'm curious if that 54% has been holding solid. I think that excuse will run out sooner then later. The 25% I actually thought was high.

 

Regarding the stimulus package I have to wonder how much political cycles play a role when it takes effect, of course from a lot I've heard it's not exactly the most efficent stimulus package anyhow. In the spring I talked to my economics professor about the Finnish stimulus package and he said there is an obvious political agenda in the package. Meaning that a lot of it won't in fact come to effect now, when it would be needed the most but rather after a year or two when we might allready be facing economic expansion. It would however fit excellently with the next parliamentary elections and give a boost which enables the ruling parties to show how efficent their stimulus was when we might be feeding the cycle instead and in the longer run preparing the economy for another overheating.

The Prof is a neo-Keynsian economist though and it would not be first time he has been critical of the current regime, but it's something worth observing in the future.

EDIT: Quite a bit offtopic there but simply thought it interesting. Next midterm elections are only after two years and for the Congress it might be important to make it look like the stimulus is working and preferrably as close to the elections as possible. Too early and its flaws (and there are allways flaws) will become apparent just in time for the elections and too late and it will be judged as an inefficent piece of government spending (which it still might prove out to be).

 

I find this one a bit odd. Granted I've not followed up on internal US politics for the past 6 months, but from the general mood of this thread I was getting the impression that many of Obama's liberal supporters were increasingly disillusioned with him, or at least want him to push the more liberal points on his agenda (which he had very clearly stressed in his campaign). Almost half of the respondents finding him "very liberal" is definitely odd though. By non-US standards I would consider Obama to be somewhere around the middle, with a slight shift towards the right if anything. Whether this is smearing (as you mentioned) or simply the people asked having a much narrower view of the political spectrum I have no idea.

 

I think both are contributing factors. I think it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of that 48% are either Republican or conservative independents. (And there is a difference - not all Republicans are conservative and not all Democrats are liberals, but most conservatives are Republicans and most liberals are Democrats.) However, I also think that the GOP smear machine screaming "socialized medicine" certainly isn't helping Obama's approval ratings either.

There are a couple of other things that might be dragging the approval rating down as well. I don't think Obama helped himself at all in the speech he gave last week. I was critical of it last week as it really didn't tell anyone anything, and he might have actually hurt himself regarding some of the comments he made about the Cambridge police department (although if you read the officer's report, it does sound like the officer could have taken the high road, and chose not to).

Finally, while Rasmussen is considered a pretty good polling company, it is conservative leaning. Rasmussen does tend to get poll results that show Democrats with lower approval ratings than the average of most other polls. (CNN/USA Today polls usually show Democrats with higher approval ratings than the average of other polls, so it goes both ways.)

I do think that eventually people will stop blaming Bush for the state of the economy. When exactly that will happen is anyone's guess, but whether it's this year or next year doesn't really matter, because there's no federal elections until the end of 2010. And that's really the marker that everyone is looking at. I think we're getting near the end of the recession (housing sales up three months in a row, banks showing quarterly profits), but even if we don't start seeing tangible results until next year people have notoriously short memories.

However, one area where we won't see recovery until next year is with the job market. The unemployment rate is a lagging indicator - people generally don't start losing their jobs until we are already several months into a recession, and don't start getting hired back until we are several months out of the recession. When the July unemployment numbers are released next week, if "only" another 300,000 or so people lose their job, that will be considered a "good" number. And the unemployment number is always a big factor in elections. People are swayed by the news saying that the economy is improving, but if you don't have a job, the economy isn't improving for you.

And I agree that the 25% who say the stimulus is working is surprising. They must have polled a lot of bankers.

The is true. The money from the stimulus package that Obama signed will distribute $787 billion, but will do it over the course of two years. Only a fraction of the stimulus package has been spent at this point.

 

I'm pretty sure Bush was popular after 9/11 and the start of the wars. Not sure how popular, but I seem to recall no one really objected at the time. (I don't want to get into that discussion, just pointing out how things seemed.)

I think moderate/liberal is a very subjective opinion. To me, a conservative, Obama seems quite liberal, while to many of the more liberal members, he apparently looks almost like a Republican. I'd also say the smear machine has something to do with it, but not 100%.

I know nothing about this issue, what happened? From the way you said it, I'm guessing gaffe city? Anyway, it would have been a huge mistake for the first black president to say he's too busy running the country to care about a black professor being arrested in a primarily white, upper-crust town. (i'm guessing there were racist overtones, too.)

I'm guessing those 8% are the psychologists/entertainment people who generally see a boom in a recession. The numbers not changing may indicate the situation has bottomed out (i.e. hasn't gotten better, but hasn't gotten worse).

The further into his presidency Obama gets, the less that will hold. When he first came on the scene, he wasn't responsable for anything because he had just gotten there. Now he's been at work for 6 months+. People want to see some results.