I thought that Obama was largely exactly who he told us he would be.
Yep, which is why I didn't support him.
He let too much U of Chicago market ideology seep into his cranium. Also, I thought he would have been more ready after 8 years of Hillary.
As for health care, Obama started in the middle with an old GOP market-based plan (Romney-/Heritage-care). Obama mistakenly believed he could get moderate Repubs and the insurance companies and everybody on board. He was wrong about bi-partisanship.
I think the fact that Obama didn't crack the whip and get the full stimulus package and banking regs he wanted when there was a major crisis allowed Dems to feel they could stand up to him and derail healthcare if they weren't specially catered to.
What was he even doing wasting his time with the beer summit? Talk in broad strokes about social problems and leave local incidents to the locals.
But Obama got played and out-flanked consistently. Two years of his presidency were wasted on a fake concern over the deficit. How ridiculous that seems now (yet I recall Obama repeating the dumb analogy of a family budget). His Supreme Court nominee was simply ignored. He failed to bring up Bush and his myriad disasters -- the GOP brand should have been tarnished for decades. Worse, Obama inexplicably extended the awful Bush tax cuts for a few years. And the entire national DEM party fell into shambles on his watch.
Obama was a centrist in a right-wing era -- so yeah sort of a Rockefeller Republican. He didn't try to move the pendulum leftward. To be a Reagan of the Left -- a new Kennedy. Instead he was a good government moderate. Yawn. Leading to Trump, when the far right GOP and the establishment Bush types should have been eviscerated, and fully countered. Sad.
Poll
5 (45.5%)