I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
For your resume, sure.
Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
No, for everyone. Some voters like politicians who pass zero legislation while holding firm to their values. Occasionally they get rewarded. Most often, they’re branded–correctly–ineffective. (And, I’d argue, unfit to lead. If you’re using millions of Americans as human shields to pass an ideologically-pure package, that’s immoral and belongs with Twitter celebrities, not leaders.)
You're arguing that it's good for a politician's resume.
Just not having that legislation, letting employment & insurance decouple and a sane market for healthcare develop might easily be better than the ACA.
Maybe? But what is the mechanism by which employment gets decoupled from health insurance? That would require a different law, I suppose?
But that wasn't what I suggested: I said having the ACA is better than not having it, not that having the ACA is better than other possible alternative laws. I can think of quite a lot of alternative healthcare reform laws that would be significantly better than the ACA.
And I think it's reasonably safe to say that in "ACA vs. nothing else", ACA wins, if we judge by the millions of people who will lose healthcare coverage if the ACA were to be repealed and not replaced with anything new.
It seems to be the only way to interpret what you suggested. How could it end up in a situation where there aren't other alternative laws? There are automatically laws governing what people do - laws exist. The conversation is entirely about which laws are best. In this case, I'm arguing that generic rules (not specifically tailored to healthcare) are probably better, since a generic market seems to outperforms the US healthcare system.
> And I think it's reasonably safe to say that in "ACA vs. nothing else", ACA wins
Well I can't control what you think but I can point out that it is a hard stance to provide evidence for. Healthcare is fundamentally less important than really urgent and essential services like food production or utilities and they manage to get great coverage with relatively limited fuss. The reports I've heard are that people find the situation in healthcare to be quite substandard.
Unregulated market is an oxymoron. It’s always regulated by someone, warlords being the extreme devolution.
For a medical emergency it does make sense for a doctor to ask if you would like to voluntarily consider an interesting bargain.
And I'd still rather have a private option in the event of a medical emergency. Ironically, insurance in a free market is actually really good at sorting out that sort of risk. The insurance company has strong incentives to negotiate what will happen in an emergency and it isn't that hard to make agreements with people in advance.
I do, however, think the passage and defense of the ACA has completely stopped any kind of healthcare reform movements from Democrats and completely turned Republicans against the idea.
[0] To be fair, it did go further than previous GOP proposals. They did include individual/employer mandates and a marketplace, but not stuff like the Medicaid expansion and higher taxes on high earners to help pay for it.
Maybe I wasn't clear. Let me try again. Many of the policies behind the ACA had long been championed by Republicans, or even originated in conservative circles. For example:
1. The individual mandate was something the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) originally came up with back in the 80s, and was presented as an alternative to Clinton's healthcare plans in the 90s.
2. The state-based exchange system was something already present in some red states like Utah, and the concept is very similar to Republican proposals (again) back in the 90s. (This shouldn't be surprising: conservatives tend to prefer that states administer programs like these. Not a criticism; just noting a tendency.)
3. Much of the ACA's framework is similar to Republican Governor Mitt Romney's healthcare reform in Massachusetts from 2006.
Sure, there are parts of the ACA that Republicans genuinely didn't support (e.g. Medicaid expansion, high-income-earner tax increases, requiring insurers to cover contraception). But big, fundamental parts of it were similar to or exactly like conservative healthcare reform plans that had been proposed over the past couple decades.
The only reason I can see to explain why Republicans so vehemently fought and voted against the ACA (and have subsequently repeatedly tried -- and failed -- to repeal it) is because they didn't want Democrats to get credit for enacting it, and once it became "blue policy", it was automatically capital-B Bad to them.
It's also telling that Republicans have failed so miserably at repealing it (though they have done it damage). That's because they have no alternative... because the ACA is more or less what they wanted in the first place.
[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...
Actually come to think of it a very similar pole reversal happened in Canada with the "Trudeau/Liberal Carbon Tax" -- a program originally proposed by the British Columbia Conservative Party, first implemented in Alberta by a Conservative Party and proposed federally by Stephen Harper of the Federal Conservatives.
While Romney has said a lot of mixed stuff over the years about the ACA, starting with pledging to repeal it during his 2012 presidential campaign, his more recent rhetoric has softened by orders of magnitude, voting against some of the repeal efforts, voting in favor of some modifications, expressing the need for a replacement plan before repealing it, and acknowledging that repealing it would cause millions of people to lose coverage. I don't agree with his position overall, but I think he's been a fairly "reasonable Republican" about it, including his belief that this sort of legislation belongs at the state level and not the federal level.
But there are plenty of Republicans in the House and Senate (more in the House, I suppose) that just seem rabidly, irrationally anti-ACA. Even while chanting "repeal and replace", they seem to forget the "replace" part of it.
Republican voters seem irrational as well: while opposition to it has softened since the Obama years, it's still pretty high (~70% or so), but you get weird effects. Like if you refer to it as "the ACA" instead of "Obamacare", Republicans don't hate it as much. Or if you don't mention "Obamacare"/"ACA" at all, and instead take a bunch of parts of the law and ask if they support them individually (like "do you support requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions?"), you see less opposition, and even see a majority of Republican voters supporting some of its provisions.
By that logic, we can never pass anything, ever. And that more or less is represented with congredd Grdidlock for the past 20 years. Is that a better outcome?
I see it as Sprint vs. Waterfall. Except Waterfall takes 8-10 years in policy to do and no one is in office long enough to finish the task. So we gotta pass in a lot of smaller tickets until we get there.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
He's about as "shades of gray" as a politician gets.
Sure. My point is both are preferable to a MAGA enabler. If you lose perspective and start aiming for perfection at the expense of the good enough, you lose power.
At least with a MAGA enabler things can get bad enough that people might realize what they have to lose.
Never could convince her that her team could do the same in the opposite direction of motion.
* American but also actually a communist, not a Democrat
This is a part (far from all, but a real part) of why they turned to someone who claimed to be willing to get things done—even if he had to break rules to do it.
I'm not going to say that I wish those seats had been filled by Republicans, instead, because I don't know how much worse that would have made things. It's very possible that we still would've gotten 2 Trump terms even so.
But I don't think it's fair to paint them as unquestionably better, when the second-order effects are real, and, while impossible to measure, potentially devastating.
Expensive, yes.
I was just pointing to an example of why healthcare reform is politically difficult. One relevant to the ACA was ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions, which caused a majority of people's premiums to go up to subsidize those who are chronically ill. Morally, most people agree it's the right thing to do, but it was politically disastrous since one person gets one vote.
There are plenty of treatments that aren’t subsidized, but it’s not as restricted as it might be perceived. There’s very little whining about things not being covered, because most things are.
Compare the "restriction" section of Ozempic vs metformin. Ozempic is absolutely not allowed to be prescribed as a first resort against type 2 diabetes. Contrast that with a lot of American private insurance, particularly at good employers, where restrictions are much looser. This performative generosity for common treatments, especially trendy ones, is why most people view their private insurance positively, much higher than the state of healthcare in the country.
The other problem is that the Democrats don't seem to realize that incremental change doesn't really work when the system of government is messed up like it is. Every little small-ball policy the Dems try to push through can just be undone later by administrative gimmicks as long as we have the level of ambiguity we do about executive power. Beyond that, they can be rolled back by countervailing legislation because the Republicans are focused on gaming the system. "Substantive" radical policies like universal healthcare are unlikely to be achievable without first enacting "procedural" radical policies like anti-gerrymandering rules or abolishing the senate.
Indeed. Because anyone who is numerate enough to do the division quickly realizes that this works out to about $300 per person, and stops being excited about the Wowie Big Number.
Obama had a plan early on to be inspired by Lincoln's cabinet of rivals and to try to unite the parties. Because of that he didn't push nearly as hard on the right wing of his party early on like Lieberman, who were the holdouts who pushed for the lack of a public option to have true universal healthcare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...
This was the Republican alternative to the time's Hillarycare proposal, and was authored by the Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame.
Yes it didn't get debated, but the formal debate stage of a bill is pretty late in the process these days. It's been theater at best for at least a century. The actual debating happens at the stage the HEART Act got to.
It got dropped because the Republicans won congress in the midterms and didn't actually want to change anything about health care; the HEART act was just what they came up with as a proposal if they were to be forced.
Right? So Republicans did not support it, or want it. It was just part of the Clinton Plan politics and negotiation. When Clinton failed, HEART totally disappeared.
recently Republicans have been trying to distance themselves from it
Of the 18 Republicans who co-sponsored it, none are still in politics, 14 of the 18 are now dead. Republicans today have literally nothing to do with it. It is getting silly to say a Republican today has any connection or responsibility for this proposal that never even came close to a vote, and not one current Republican has any connection to.
The ideal Republican plan was to have no healthcare reform. When faced with the proposition that no reform would cease to be tolerated, this was absolutely the Republican plan for health care reform, broadly supported by Republican leadership.
> Of the 18 Republicans who co-sponsored it, none are still in politics, 14 of the 18 are now dead. Republicans today have literally nothing to do with it. It is getting silly to say a Republican today has any connection or responsibility for this proposal that never even came close to a vote, and not one current Republican has any connection to.
They still mostly existed in politics at the passing of the ACA and the initial push back from the Republicans. Both the HEART Act and the ACA existed within the US's Sixth Political System.
To claim they wanted that bill is entirely deceptive.
Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party. Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court." There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.
It was the republican plan for healthcare reform. They didn't want to reform healthcare, but when forced to, this was their plan. And it had been for years; the Heritage Foundation had been kicking the plan around since about 1989.
> It is also somewhat of a mischaracterization to call it a mandate for health insurance, it was much more narrowly focused covering catastrophic events.
That's not my read. Can you point to where in the draft text of the act that makes you say that?
> Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party.
It was introduced by John Chafee, lifelong Republican.
And it was co-sponsored by Bob Dole (Senate Minority leader before becoming Majority leader the next year, and who would become the Presidential nominee in 1996), and had the support of Newt Gingrich, the Republican Leader of the House, and frankly the leader of the Republican party at the time.
It had broad Republican support including by Republican leadership.
> Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court."
Yeah, over night any Republican caught supporting the ACA would be metaphorically tarred and feathered by the party. That didn't mean that they didn't previously literally write the basis for the ACA, only that they were trying not to get blamed for it.
> There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.
It literally called for a tax to enforce the individual mandate. Honestly more of a tax than the ACA which simply withheld tax refunds and at the time was still grey area as to whether or not that actually counted as a true tax.
> SEC. 1501. REQUIREMENT OF COVERAGE.
>
> (a) In General.--Effective January 1, 2005, each individual who is
> a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States shall be
> covered under--
> (1) a qualified health plan, or
> (2) an equivalent health care program (as defined in
> section 1601(7)).
> (b) Exception.--Subsection (a) shall not apply in the case of an
> individual who is opposed for religious reasons to health plan
> coverage, including an individual who declines health plan coverage due
> to a reliance on healing using spiritual means through prayer alone.
...
> ``SEC. 5000A. FAILURE OF INDIVIDUALS WITH RESPECT TO HEALTH INSURANCE.
> ``(a) General Rule.--There is hereby imposed a tax on the failure
> of any individual to comply with the requirements of section 1501 of
> the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993.
People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here.
The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, once the effects are borne out, win congress in a landslide.
Perhaps Obama couldn't have made it happen, but he didn't try. He could have made a speech about "how we will do because not because it's easy, but because it's possible because every other western nation has this same basic thing." But here we are with a crappy compromise.
In terms of almost any possible quality of life metric you can think of Europe is ahead of the US.
That combined with just a breathtaking level of ignorance of what Europe is actually like in any meaningful sense. You saw this a lot in this NYC election where they were trying to paint Mamdani as an actual communist because well over half of the country has no idea what “democratic socialism” means let alone communism.
I remember the parent of an ex of mine who was from NY tell me how lucky they were to have such incredible insurance and medical coverage when his wife got cancer because he only had to pay the first $100k/yr out of pocket and then the rest was “free”. It was repeatedly stressed to me what a rare thing this was and most people would be in such a worse position.
Anyways, long story short… They hit that limit by February and then spent the rest of the year getting denied by their insurance company until the day she died. But at least she was treated at “the best cancer hospital in the world”.
Last time I checked, Australia had better cancer survival rates than the US, higher quality of life, greater expected life span, and a hybrid medicare / private insurance system that covered almost the entire population such that very few faced medical bills outside the reach of their income (or lack thereof).
I had a stent inserted to clear a clot that travelled to my heart from a knee injury - free (surgery, two and half days in hospital, follow up recovery and lifestyle advice appoints).
The ambulance cost more as I was between St John's Ambulance covers at the time, that was $500 which I was happy to pay (myself, my father, and multiple family members have all worked as volunteer ambulance drivers and paramedics over the years).
You're not wrong, but this thread makes it sound like the US is completely backwards when it's off by 1-2% and higher than other "socialist" countries.
Laughable statement, considering Europeans give a leg and a arm to live in America.
Just talk like a normal adult with your normal account and accept that maybe some people think your opinion is bad and you lose an internet point.
For what it’s worth, not that you asked but this year in particular has really only cemented my view of the general US citizen as a very scared individual who is terrified to stand up for anything.
What you’re doing right now is actually great example of that under what could only be described as the lowest stakes scenario possible.
You could probably learn something from the “cheese eating surrender monkey” French who you’re all to happy to compare yourselves against but at least they are willing to fight for what they have.
Is this satire? Or do you not believe that racism exist in America?
No we don't.
Sure, most of us used to like the USA a decade ago, but even back then it would have to be a right weirdo (everywhere has them) to think that highly of the USA.
If anything, I'm thinking of a healthcare cost comparison a while back, which said that for the cost of a single hip replacement in the USA, someone could fly from the USA to Spain, get it done privately, spend a year just living normally in Spain while recovering, break the other hip and get that replaced too, and still come out ahead.
(I never fact-checked that meme, what with me living in the UK at the time where the NHS supplies everything free at point of use unless you opt for private care that very few bother with; I'm now in Germany whose system is basically what the UK left fears is dangerously American and the US right fears is dangerously like the UK's NHS).
Or some of the stuff we hear about Americans considering the 2nd amendment to be a "god given right". No thanks: safety isn't where I can get armed up, it's where I don't need to.
But now? Trump's reelection has coincided with a lot of people changing from thinking of the place as "ally sharing our values" to just "a necessary partner", a downgrade to significantly less than you describe.
Sensible voices are a rare thing in this climate and it’s incredibly easy to stand out as one if you stop playing by a set of rules that were intentionally designed to make you fail in the first place.
Honestly I think the American exceptionalism shit is a cancer on the society and I find it incredibly hard to distinguish from the "Deutschland über alles" nonsense that the Germans went through. It’s just a fundamentally flawed way of looking at the world. It’s like a story a small child might believe but it really doesn’t stand up to even the most gentle of scrutiny.
I think it would be wise for us to remember that it is/was not only Americans that believed in American exceptionalism, but immigrants that were actually trying to come to the States among other possible options who believed in it-- prior to this administration that is. You would have to admit it would be a ridiculous thing for them to do if they couldn't distinguish it from "Deutschland über alles".
>>You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
This was the Republican president Ronald Reagan speaking. The world has caught up obviously since then in this regard as well, but prior to this administration it would not be a stretch to say this was true of America more than any other nation.
The louder you get with this type of message, the more you will push people farther away.
FWIW I lived in 3 continents including Europe and the densest cities in the world. The best QOL I've had is in deep red voting rural areas.
Also we aren’t talking about your personal preferences here in terms of quality of life but about hard data. The numbers aren’t even close. The one you listed as your personal favorite comes last in those categories.
I’m not trying to be rude but it sure seems like you’ve taken your preference of living in a rural area vs living in a city and then tried to build an argument around that.
How many genuinely ex-MAGA people do you know? I think for most people that number is at absolute best a very low single digit number.
There are a whole bunch of people out there who are entirely disenfranchised who just can’t be bothered to vote however who could be inspired to do so and this thread is very literally about someone who went with that strategy and won.
I’m simply making the argument that you should spend your time there instead and keep your integrity in the process. People actually want something to believe in and a concept of fairness, affordability, justice and anti-corruption is an incredibly wide tent already. Stick with that.
There is a deep, foundational information problem that would need to be overcome for this to ever actually happen. Medicare, for example, is viewed incredibly favorably, but tons of people don’t even know it’s a government program! This survey found only 58% of people over 65 recognized that: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/medicare/medica...
We are in an information twilight zone where perception of policy outcomes is basically entirely dependent on choice of news sources.
For ten years, every year, drop the eligibility age by 1 year. Then for the next ten years, every year, drop the eligibility age by 2 years. Maybe keep going at 2 years every year from there, but it should probably be adjusted over time as the effects of rising enrollment show the acheivable enrollment rate.
In the meantime, start covering all kids with Medicaid from birth to X, adding 6 months every year for the first 10 years, then 1 year per year until it overlaps with most people getting enough social security credits to be eligible for Medicare. At that point, you can probably just make Medicaid available for everyone, if you don't have 40 social security credits by age 35, you probably qualify for Medicaid under current rules. Again, it'd be helpful for Congress to supervise and adjust as needed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/upshot/one-third-dont-kno...
They barely passed ACA after over a year of negotiating with the Republicans and removing lots off provisions from it. How do you expect someone to just come along and pass an even more radical reform?
Bad casual reasoning. There is so little evidence that voters care about policies years before they go into effect.
The push for the ideal might have locked in something generational. Maybe.
But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's little more than an subsidy for private insurance companies whose profits dramatically increased relatively shortly after adapting to it. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be adversarial towards private insurance, but it should not directly drive increases in profits because, especially once its mandated + subsidized, profits need to be controlled as the government is effectively guaranteeing them.
Medical loss ratios (insurers must pay a minimum percent of premium revenue on medical costs) are obviously insufficient since they do nothing to motivate lower costs. On the contrary, it directly incentivizes maximizing costs which is exactly what's happened. For one specific datum medicare administrative costs are around 2% - private insurance administrative costs start around 12%.
---
Basically there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed. And now with the country so divided, it's unlikely we'll be getting anything better anytime in the foreseeable future, because whichever side tries to pass it will simply be opposed by the other, regardless of merit. Hopefully Mamdani isn't a complete failure, because more parties in power is perhaps one way to break the divides in society.
What are you basing this on? Again, Pelosi lost her House because of ACA. Republicans shut down the government multiple times trying to repeal it. They narrowly missed, but because the compromise was powerful. Had Pelosi and Obama pushed harder on ACA, chances are high it would have never passed.
I’m not saying it was perfectly calibrated. But the problems you’re mentioning would have meant battling entire new categories of powerful interest groups. That's what, in part, sank HillaryCare.
Watching old Obama speeches, I find him mostly run-of-the-mill. Trump, whether or not you like him, is far more charismatic - his success is built on his charisma. Also, look up Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan speeches, by maybe that isn't what you mean by 'modern times'.
Print out one of his speeches and read them. His success is built on backlash against the shock of seeing a black president.
Charisma is a different axis to all of that.
A lot of people, for reasons I cannot even empathise with, demonstrably like him. One could even describe their response as "idolising" him. (Where does one draw the line between "a cult of personality" and "apotheosis" anyway?)
It's part of why the ancient Greeks thought government came in cycles, with democracy being only a transitory state.
Her primary theory is that it is built out of a combination of formidable and approachable traits/behaviors. Naturally, there is a fair amount of personal variability in what we perceive as "formidable" and "approachable", so what seems charismatic will vary from person to person; it's not fully objective.
But her theory is that this is why you can have people who are, objectively, more repugnant still read as charismatic, and people who are very pleasant read as less charismatic: the latter may be very approachable, but they don't have enough formidability to synthesize that into charisma, while the former add just enough approachability that they can.
If the words are bad then it suggests his success comes from elsewhere, possibly charisma (whatever that means).
> His success is built on backlash against the shock of seeing a black president.
Assuming that's true, lots of people could have capitalized from that; why him in particular?
People talk about Trump because he/his team excels at distraction through outrage. He's not charismatic, he's dopaminergic.
Did you watch the 60 minutes interview?
I mean, even his supporters are constantly trying to "decipher" his messaging. He is constantly failing to recite basic facts correctly, and I don't mean the general lies, but you know stuff like basic geography/history knowledge and stuff. He doesn't come off as primary education pilled.
But sure, it's all fake news. He'll make the US great again and all. Any day now.
I wonder if you would challenge yourself the same with Mamdani or Obama, or somewhat unrelated: Hunter Biden.....
Trump is nearly opposite, he doesn't speak as well clearly. But his actions are stronger, and thats what the voters want. They don't want a smoother talker that tells you what you want to hear and does nothing.
Obama is charismatic and one of the best to give a speech.
Really? Maybe a decade ago, but now? He cannot keep a coherent thought for more than a few seconds, so every speech is a fucking rambling mess. Even subtitles cannot help make sense of it most of the time.
> - his success is built on his charisma
Bullshitter sales people can be very charming at times, I will give you that.
Curtis Sliwa was significantly to the left of both Eric Adams and Cuomo on a whole host of issues, which is one of the many reasons why Trump refused to endorse Silwa (they hate each other). If we didn't have a Sinema or Manchin, we might have liberal republicans like a Silwa who would be objectively better if you're a liberal.
And they only passed it by bypassing the fillibuster and using the budget reconciliation process.
But arguably, if they were more aggressive and offered bigger benefits, they'd get more support. The GOP has been extremely aggressive, generally. People don't vote for those hesitant and afraid of conflict.
> You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
True, and it's also true if the Dems had a few more Sanderses and Warrens - and then they'd have a solid majority rather than one that caved like Manchin. But they'd need a bunch more to pass a healthcare bill without reconciliation.
The average person wants someone who "totally dunked on the other guy, dude" and then loses the election but "never sold out, man". Part of the wisdom of supporting Rosa Parks and not just the first Black woman who was in that position is about being good at winning so your cause advances.
Our lives in America are so good that winning or advancing your cause doesn't really move the needle as much as "making a stand, dude" is. Given that life is really good and change isn't immediately to acute suffering, almost all politics for the average person is about posturing and signaling.
From closer to home, people are annoyed in San Francisco that the state speed camera laws are not permanent and the fines are not humongous for someone going 100 mph over the limit. Most people fantasize about things happening as God placing down edict from upon high, rather than the thing that can happen on the political frontier.
This is the essence of politics.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
Please, grow a better sense of politics.
The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified abortion rights. But instead they keep it around as an outstanding issue because it is a good fundraising issue.
Again, I implore you all to grow a bit smarter.
Obama understood this and respected the office. Trump took a fat dump on the office and I'm not sure if our country's values will ever recover from this race to the bottom.
At a bare minimum, he signed into law the NDAA of 2012, which authorized the government to ignore people's civil liberties in cases where they were suspected of terrorism. On that basis I do not personally agree that he respected the office.
Obama is not some good hearted hero who had his hands tied. He ran on pretty progressive campaign because it polled well and when he came to office he just did what his sponsors wanted - keep status quo.
It was keeping the money in pockets of billionaires and corporations while talking about promise of potential change by the most charismatic president ever.
That's why people don't trust democrats.
Are you talking about Obama or Trump?
> US president is still the most powerful political position on the planet. They can do stuff you know.
And this is why people don't trust republicans. They are all "checks and balances" and "Constitution" until the dictatorship they want is upon them.
Biden try to forgive student loans. The courts blocked him. They clearly cannot just "do stuff you know". Not without risk of impeachment for executive overreach.
These limits of power were always Obamas excuse when he was supposed to push for something inconvinient. That was the narrative to not try too hard. When you start to look at what hes done… the small things, the mundane and the stuff he had clearly power over. It's not good. Biden was very different in that aspect.
I don't want a liberal Trump.
If a Democrat did any of the hundreds of actions performed this year, they'd be blocked by the SCOTUS, and then impeached by the House because they ignored the SCOTUS. And probably Convicted by Senate.
A democrat has not been able to do something as bold as blasting through the courts since FDR (and for that time, the term "democrat" may not even be the correct word to use), and that was under a depression with very popular support from the people. Imagine if congress flipped and fought as hard against SS as they did against the ACA. The Silent and Boomer generations would be in shambles decades later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...
Snowden has also spoken about this at length, saying he expected a change when Obama was elected due to his campaigning against the PATRIOT Act, but there was no change. This is only one of many policies in which Obama changed his stance after he became President.
Based on Rahm Emanuel's advice, the Obama administration did not focus political capital on the federal judiciary. Not only did Obama fail to get RBG to retire when she could be confidently replaced by a liberal, he didn't take judicial placements in the lower courts as seriously as he should have. The courts are substantial part of how we got here.
Yes, Obama was not a king. But there was stuff he absolutely could have done, especially during his first two years when he had the trifecta, that he didn't take seriously.
I imagine there was a lot of complacency based on the (erroneous) assumption that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.
RBG was a 75 year old cancer survivor in 2008. She should have stepped down in 2010 and the Obama administration should have put public pressure on her to do so.
But by all accounts Obama did not push her very hard or treat this as a priority. He shouldn't have just asked nicely and then gone away once she said no. They could have built a public media narrative around pressuring her to retire.
Do you people not understand the "anti-feminist" backlash this would have caused?
Y'all are really doing a whole lot of checkers thinking for what is a chess game.
I saw a similar thing in the UK where the newly-minted Labour government thought they could combat ReformUK on asylum policy. Luckily, I think they're slowly starting to realise that, no matter how hard they tack, ReformUK will always promise something more insane and unworkable.
They'll find something on Zohran, or else he'll make some compromise that makes the left turn on him. It's just a matter of time.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
...I mean c'mon now. Congress passed what they could and it cost the Dems greatly. Why are we pretending Obama could have gotten more?
Look at Bill Clinton's net worth when he left office and now.
It wasn't the final stage of their career but only the beginning.
Then they govern from the centre right status quo which aligns more with their actual beliefs.