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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel like people here are down on Obama at all. They're down on things the government has done and not done, which is now (to some extent) Obama's fault since he's (to some extent) in charge of it. But I don't hear any grumbling about him personally.

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I feel like news sources are down on him. It's a better story with a scapegoat.

In a bit of meta-irony, my own comment illustrates itself. The core here is that we care about good stories much more than true ones.

A number of people I've talked to that voted for him in the last election have been saying that they're unhappy with the president and Democratically led congress. There is a good chance that many on HN are unhappy also. They might not be vocal about it, because just stating that unhappiness doesn't accomplish much, and it really isn't an appropriate forum for politics. I personally will be supporting fiscally conservative candidates in the future that have supported small business and that I think would be good leaders. I hope that the days of judging candidates by charisma are over, and instead we look at track record. A track record of being a professor and community organizer is inappropriate for the leader of the free world during a time when support of business is imperative.

Shouldn't they be angry about the system that polarizes the two sides into waring factions that cannot get anything done in a reasonable timeframe? Look at right now, the right will not vote anything controversial in that may or may not be good for the economy because they are too worried about conceding to the left. The same thing happens when the right is in power. midterm elections make the window of possible change so small that nothing really gets done.

The less congress does the better - every time congress starts to act they increase the amount of uncertainty about the future which makes it hard to predict what the appropriate investments are.

The two sides? You've stumbled across another problem: facile and vapid Manicheanism.

Ad hominem.

There's a difference between feeling unhappy with the current president and congress and feeling that you'd not have voted for them now given the same choices available at the time.

I suspect that no matter how unhappy people are with Obama, many of them will still pull the lever for him in 2012.

I think most people, including from the opposite end of the political spectrum, aren't necessarily down on Obama the man. But they are down on the vagaries of his administration.

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