[pcunite]

Obama could have been special. The symbol, the icon for an America forgiven of its past and now authoring hope for future people of all races. Perhaps it was power that corrupted him or maybe it was his close advisors that stymied his original purer motives.

I remember feeling so proud that we had a black President. I knew he was human, I know that skin color does not matter, but it was hard to not hope that given what his race has been through - he could understand what was wrong with the world ... and maybe fix it.

For reasons he only knows, he choose to side with abuse. He has perverted himself with something so addictive that perhaps the best course of action maybe for him to take a seat at the back of the bus.

[danenania]

Another explanation that I sadly believe to be much more realistic is that Obama never had pure motives. He was just playing the game (as any candidate must to win the support of either establishment party), and he took many millions of hopeful people along for the ride.

It's important for people who believed in Obama's rhetoric to stop making excuses and realize that they were conned. Fool me once, shame on you...

[spin]

I wonder, though, if perhaps a lot of "power decisions" are made at the margin.

(I mean "making decisions at the margin" in the way that economists use the term. For example: I wish cheese was free. But, in real life, I have a choice between $2.49 cheese and $2.19 cheese. So I buy the cheaper cheese, not the free cheese. Because the free cheese doesn't exist.)

If the President has to make small decisions about "the lesser of two evils", then how much power does he really have?

For example: He said he would close Guantanamo Bay, but didn't. One theory is that he was full of shit. He's just a tool. Another theory is that there wasn't the political capital to accomplish such a thing. As in: there was enough push-back from his own party... he didn't want to alienate some of his friends... as in, he couldn't afford to. So he says: "Screw it. A couple hundred people in hell isn't worth my career if I can focus on other things that can benefit more people."

(I'm not trying to be an apologist for Obama here. I think Washington is pretty horribly corrupt in both parties...)

So I'm left to wonder: Sure, no smart politician is going to burn his own career for a couple hundred foreigners that the citizens hate anyway (I guess...). But why is Gitmo still open? What does it accomplish? (I keep going around in circles trying to figure out why anyone loves Gitmo...)

A president "spends power" at the margins. He spent a lot of power on Obamacare. (You call in favors, you do the horse-trading...) But he has spent no power against the "Security Industrial Complex". I guess it's not something that he cares to achieve. People are calling it "Bush's 4th term". I understand the contractors profit from "Fear of Terrorists". And I'm sure there are some military / intelligence people who are actually hard-core about it. But, outside of that.... who the fuck loves it? I just don't get it... Washington has wrapped itself into a self-sustaining engine of fear...

... oy vey. And here we're not supposed to be getting all political on HN... :-/

[pavanred]

Lesser of the two evils, I don't think its that polarized, there are grey areas. Not closing down Gitmo because of the lack of political will from congress is understandable but there are other decisions such as curbing the hunger strike with forced nasal feeding every day is another decision. I agree it's in the rule book that says if the body weight index drops beyond a point, use nasal feeding but I guess when you make such a decision you can weigh the differences between a medical decision and a hunger protest and deal with them a little differently.

Besides, if you are the president and your campaign promise was to close a prison. Keeping in mind that many people there are held without charges for over a decade and a few are already cleared to be let go but are still there for reasons I don't understand, if you can't do this being a president in 2 terms then perhaps you just can't do it, least you can do is make way for someone who can.

[cinquemb]

Agreed, he was bought and paid for like nearly all the politicians that came before him.

It's kind of amusing on some level because the trope goes: Let's demand xyz be done about xyz, but let's not do/think of what we can to work on xyz ourselves within our own local communities before we are given permission by the establishment, who made xyz possible, to impose it on everyone else.

[johnchristopher]

If by rhetoric you refer to Obama's campaign: The fact he didn't act as he said he would doesn't lessen the values of the rhetoric he held.

The arguments, the conviction, the ideology developed during his campaign holds the same values today as it did yesterday. The earth is round and it isn't less so if crooks say it.

[snowden]

It does reduce the faith in the hope and change that was promised by our president. After all he does not walk the talk. He is the do as I say president not as I do. After all he does send his children to private school while preaching the virtues of public education. He is no different than any other politician in that regard, a hypocrite.

Past performance or lack there of is an indicator of future performance. Obama has not been able to deliver on most of his promises from closing Gitmo to bringing this nation together. Does anyone believe he is capable of doing the right thing? Just talking about it does not count.

[johnchristopher]

I am not defending Obama and I am not saying he's going to change.

[dalek_cannes]

I never thought I'd see the day when I'll see a sentence with both "Obama" and "change" in it with a "not" in between.

[straight_talk_2]

Green and naive.

[a3n]

Yes. He had one motive, to get elected. He said whatever would convince money to contribute, and he said whatever would convince people to vote. And none of it meant a thing.

This is true for all politicians. Even the one you think is yours.

There will be no Messiah.

[saraid216]

> Another explanation that I sadly believe to be much more realistic is that Obama never had pure motives.

FYI, no one has pure motives past the age of 10. There are only people who delude themselves into thinking their motives are pure.

[danenania]

Not speaking of a tremendously high bar for purity here. I would have settled for someone who didn't think it was ok to kill and imprison people without trial, psychologically torture whistleblowers, and attempt to spy on the digital communications of everyone on the planet.

[saraid216]

Perhaps what we should advocate is for every presidential candidate to go through a brainwashing program that removes these tolerances?

[eplanit]

"Perhaps it was power that corrupted him or maybe it was his close advisors that stymied his original purer motives."

...so, his purity, innocence, and honesty was corrupted from the outside, by others? Did he not choose and hire his own advisors? Isn't this like blaming Cheney for everything Bush did?

"he could understand what was wrong with the world ... and maybe fix it."

Obama the Messiah? What U.S. President could ever 'fix' the problems of the world?

"...perhaps the best course of action maybe for him to take a seat at the back of the bus."

So, let's revert back to racist treatment? This statement of yours is what drove me to the keyboard this early in the morning.

Your arguments are _bizarre_. It is amazing what the Left projected onto Obama in terms of hopes and aspirations. His _only_ career has been that of a politician, yet the Left expected him to be something else? He never ran a city, a state, a company, or ever made/produced anything. His career is an extreme example of Affirmative Action, if anything. For goodness sake, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for simply having been elected. That seems quite premature and misguided in hindsight now, doesn't it?

I admit, I voted for him in '08 and was proud to do so. I've never been more regretful of any of my votes in my 32 years of casting ballots.

[pekk]

To understand that Nobel, you have to understand two things:

1. The awarding of the Nobel peace prize is ALWAYS political, not just in this case. The committee is wielding a tool, that is all.

It is no use getting upset by the assumption that this committee is a moral authority and Obama got unfair special treatment. They give these prizes as a political tool or signal.

2. This prize was given in the context of a bounty of needless new wars/colonial projects, especially Iraq. You can figure out what the intended signal was from this.

Now you have to admit that our involvement in Iraq has reduced dramatically, and now at least we have a timetable for Afghanistan. But that's actually beside the point. The peace prize is given as a tool by a certain European set to exert influence. It's not a justly-given award for moral perfection.

Unless you understand these things, you are going to keep scratching your head about that Nobel prize forever.

[pcunite]

Quote: "So, let's revert back to racist treatment? This statement of yours is what drove me to the keyboard this early in the morning."

Forgive me, I only meant to say that he was supposed to help injustice, a world he claims to have come from. Now, he "sits in the front seat" so to speak and makes a mockery of what Rosa Parks endured. She really created change.

[crusso]

I'm all for welcoming more people to the Don't Trust Obama club, but let's be honest here. Many of us saw his flaws long before this NSA scandal, which he and his minions now lump in with the set of "phony scandals".

Voting for someone because of their race is every damned bit as bad as voting against someone because of their race.

Maybe you folks who are surprised by the recent change in your attitude toward our President should stop voting for candidates who consistently hold positions against individual liberty?

[zzzeek]

the alternative was mccain/palin. In the primaries, Hillary was the alternative. Second time around it was Romney. None of these candidates would have had any substantive differences on these particular issues and on almost every other issue would have been far worse. Single issue voting is just as naive as believing rhetoric at face value.

we absolutely need to protest Obama's actions in this area but as far as voting differently at the presidential level, unless we can radically change our voting system to realistically support 3rd party candidates, presidential politics isn't going to change much.

[mikeash]

Even with a changed voting system, I don't think it's going to change much.

The reality is that the average American is frightened of terrorism and wants the government to protect them. The average American believes in "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." The average American is still in a Cold War mindset and thinks that we need a massive military and intelligence apparatus to avoid being invaded and conquered.

The conversation in the tech community has centered around the system and the process, making the implicit assumption that the American public generally agrees with us that these acts are bad, and they're being foisted upon us without our consent by an out-of-control government. The reality, as far as I can tell, is that the American public does not generally agree with the tech community on these issues, and that we've ended up with these massive spying and anti-terror programs because that is the government the American public wants.

I firmly believe that our efforts should be directed toward convincing the public at large of our positions. If accomplished, the government will follow. The system is not (yet) that broken.

[richardjordan]

So I think this is actually not true. The average American isn't really frightened of terrorism. They don't pay attention and just want decisions made by someone else. They are comfortable when those decisions are framed in simplistic Manichaean terms because it demands little thought.

[mikeash]

I think we may be in agreement. I don't think Americans are deeply frightened of terrorism in the sense that it keeps them awake at night, causes them to be unable to carry out daily activities, etc. However, I think they buy into the narrative pushed by media and government that terrorism is a significant threat and one that we should be concerned about. This is not really the fault of media and government, however, because it ends up as a feedback loop. Government and media amplify the fears of the populace, which then feeds back into the public as a whole. I think that breaking the public away from paying attention to the "This common household product could be killing you, details at 11!" style of TV news is key.

[crusso]

Of that entire group you just mentioned, the most divisive class warfare big government statist was Obama.

At least if McCain had been elected then we would have had opposition party contention between the executive and legislative branches.

At least with a Republican in office, the media would have been more likely to do its job by asking tougher questions and analyzing rather than fawning and adulating.

Before all that, though, maybe people should get involved earlier in the process and not let the media, the party leaders, and Saturday Night Live pick their candidates for them?

[zzzeek]

right, because when we had republicans like Bush/Cheney in office, everything went far better than they are now. Feel free to be a Republican just as I feel free to be a Democrat, but that's not really relevant to this issue. The majority of Obama's support on these issues comes from Republicans.

[crusso]

Since I never voted for any Bush, your straw man does not apply. I'm not advocating being a Republican. I'm advocating being independent and making strategic decisions about candidates based upon core principles - rather than being a jersey-wearing die-hard fan of a political party.

That said, I do think that having a Republican administration take the blame for the current scandals (IRS, NSA, AP, Benghazi) would have been a good thing.

If we extrapolate the level of anal probing that went on as a result of the Valerie Plame outing to the above scandals, the media wouldn't let any of them go until something more meaningful happened in congress, in the courts, or in voting booths.

As it is, these scandals are all disappearing from the MSM's coverage. Maybe they can do another multi-month coverage of George Zimmerman-like trials to take our minds off of important things.

[zzzeek]

I'm not a "fan" of the democrats, as I said, if we had a viable multi-party system I'd much more often be voting green, with democrats as my second choice, so that a losing green vote isn't a winning republican vote. But as it stands, there is no way to vote for a "first and second choice".

Also, as we went to war in Iraq because the MSM, including the new york times, as well as congress, went along with the republicans, so you can't generalize that a certain combination of R/D leads to the most checks and balances via the government or the media. The democrats in congress rubber stamped a whole set of republican policies - the democrats are a terrible opposition party since they offer so little of it. Checks and balances are essentially working terribly (we currently have 100% obstruction for almost all issues, then for this one we have too little) and no R/D pattern will fix that, only changes to the rules including voting (compulsory, allow second choices) and campaign finance (there should be almost no finance in campaigns) will change that.

[cdash]

Not really, there is a small minority of democrats and a small minority of republicans that don't support him on these issues and all the rest do on both sides.

[saraid216]

Our current voting system is a conservative wet dream. It's designed so that you're voting against every other party, so you're not trying to advance a platform, but rather trying to prevent the onset of a worse one.

It's not our voting system that needs to be radically changed. It's the extent to which we rely on representatives to hold power for us. It's the 21st century; why don't we have tools to collaboratively write legislation?

[omarali]

These videos show what is wrong with our voting system and give a better alternative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

[protomyth]

"Obama could have been special."

I have a honest question, did you read his voting record, see what bills he had wrote / sponsored / co-sponsored, or listen to his podcast[1] before deciding he was worth your hope for that symbol? The media narrative for both sides is smoke and mirrors. The only real truth is what the do in legislation.

1) Yes, he had one as a US Senator.

[superuser2]

What they do in legislation isn't the full story, either. People vote against bills that sound like good ideas because there's something nasty subtly buried inside them. People vote for bad bills to collect votes for good ones.

Someone who kept a pristine voting record would not actually get anything done.

[protomyth]

Yes, the legislative system is has its game, but sponsorship and co-sponsorship tells a lot. Most legislators tell folks what their vote meant and most bill titles are fantasy. You need to look deeper than the soundbite to determine what the legislative record means.

[rjsw]

The lesson should be not to elect slippery lawyers in future, the UK made that mistake with Tony Blair too.

[northwest]

The lesson IMO is to rebuild the whole political system, on a foundation made of sane rules. (And that should obviously include all government agencies, especially those which have been corrupting democracy for a few decades now.)

EDIT: Don't forget that one of the earlier whistle blowers said (a few months back) that Obama had been put under surveillance by the NSA as well [0], which means

a) you should expect him to have been vetted by the powers in place before being admitted as a presidential candidate by that 1 of the 2 parties available,

b) "they" have stuff on him and can handle him like a puppet that he seems to have become.

Ergo, it's not about which puppet you elect, it's about the system.

[0] http://www.peterbcollins.com/2013/06/19/boiling-frogs-blockb...

[alan_cx]

And not Cameron?

Blair had a plan, he managed to execute a fair amount of it, then fell apart. Exactly like Thatcher. Cameron has none. Oh yeah, "austerity", which I think the US has now shown to be not the way to go. Heh, Cameron even nicked that idea off Brown. Like Obama, he just continued with the previous leader's polices.

Sorry, both sides are full of crap. UK, US, its all the same. Its that old thing, "no matter who you vote for, the government always get in."

[rjsw]

I was discounting Cameron as he hasn't won an election and isn't very good at getting people to believe in stuff.

[SkyMarshal]

>Perhaps it was power that corrupted him or maybe it was his close advisors that stymied his original purer motives.

I think it's more likely that the Federal bureaucracy is simply more powerful than our elected officials, at least some ways. They provide a great deal of the information Congress and the President use to inform their worldviews and decisions, and probably have well developed methods of getting what they want from the two. The bureaucracy has a real advantage by simply having less turnover, more continuous time in the system, hence more institutional knowledge of how to work the system, than the average politician.

[phaus]

Why would you be proud to have a black president? If his race ever entered into the equation for you, that's a data point in favor of establishing a screening process for voting eligibility. (I'm against such a thing but I often feel that most people are making completely arbitrary decisions.)

Race is just one of many things that is "wrong" with the world. The two biggest things seem to be the tendency of humans to want to kill or convert anyone who follows a different ideology, and poverty. If I had to guess, in many cases the former is keeping many parts of the world from escaping the latter.

[pekk]

Did you really need to say that Obama should sit at the back of the bus? What does that add to the political discourse? It is needlessly inflammatory. Say that you want him out of politics, not something that sounds racist for no reason.

[pcunite]

Forgive me, I only meant to say that he was supposed to help injustice, a world he claims to have come from. Now, he "sits in the front seat" so to speak and makes a mockery of what Rosa Parks endured. She really created change

[Datsundere]

I suggest you watch lesterland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

[kailuowang]

It's all in comparison. Obama is surely no saint but please name a president (or even a recent president candidate) with better record than Obama.

Clinton? Bush? Reagan? Romney?

[icecreampain]

Your mistake was believing that (1) there was a choice and (2) the _two_ choices actually differed in any meaningful way.

Both parties have the same masters.

[acgourley]

I hear that a lot, but I'm curious who these masters are. And if you say "corporations" I'd like to know which ones you suspect.

[icecreampain]

I am unable to say. The name of the group, or groups, controlling both the government and corporations is unimportant. Call it the illuminati or the jews or whatever. All I know is that money is an extremely good reason for the super rich to create groups that help them continue be super rich.

The idealist in me died when he realized that even large, powerful governments can be undermined and destroyed by this controlling group (or the group's controlling group). If they can topple countries, like they have done several times in the past, then what kind of resistance can a lowly normal pose offer?

None. I've learned to just keep my nose to the grindstone, make money for myself and ignore the rest of the world. It's easiest that way.

[jup]

> For reasons he only knows, he choose to side with abuse.

Obama is a vain, stupid man who believes that he is the president of the United States. In reality he is manipulated by a small inner group of people who have the real power and who play him like a puppet. Do you really believe that a man of such limited capabilities can stage a successful campaign to become president? Obama is the biggest con ever played on the American people.

[walid]

> Obama is a vain, stupid man who believes that he is the president of the United States.

I will intentionally ignore this line above because what you later said would apply to every elected person in any country, not limited to the USA:

> In reality he is manipulated by a small inner group of people who have the real power and who play him like a puppet. Do you really believe that a man of such limited capabilities can stage a successful campaign to become president? Obama is the biggest con ever played on the American people.

Taking that into consideration, I was still hoping that the president's role was something more positive and not completely covering up the NSA's blunders when they got caught with their pants down.