People are morons. News at 11.
People who disagree with you = morons.
People who disagree with me on some particular issues (such as Obama not being the worst president since WW2) are indeed morons. And if you disagree with that you are a moron as well. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.
Gosh, I feel like Atlas is such a bubble sometimes. I sense most people here live in urban areas and do not come into contact with conservatives very often. Where I live, at least half would agree with Obama being the worst since World War II, and I can assure you that they are not morons.
Rating presidents is an exercise in qualitative judgment. We can disagree in how we judge them, but moral or intellectual superiority is not conveyed by having a certain ideology.
I think it would do some posters some real good to spend some time in a small town or rural area. It would be a good experience to understand what the other side thinks outside of some Internet abstraction.
I live in a hick town, and the calumnies that I often hear about the President are still absurd. Barack Obama polarizes America because of what he is. We have never had a President like him, and much about him makes many Americans uncomfortable with him.
He is a poor match for rural America as a politician. He has succeeded in getting elected in part by appealing to mass audiences in rural and suburban America -- and nobody wins that way in rural America. He is an egghead, and egghead types offend the sensibilities of people who get along with limited education. He can win over school teachers in town, and he still does well among unionized workers who would never vote for any right-wing Republican that those workers think seek to cut wages drastically.
The New York Times had an electoral tool that connected demographics (race, Hispanic origin, certain religious groups, income level, workers in manufacturing, educational attainment, and population density) to the Presidential vote of 2008. Edmondson County, Kentucky had the lowest proportion of college graduates (5% -- probably school teachers and perhaps a couple of attorneys, physicians, maybe an RN or two). It is very rural, poor, and white. Obama did horribly there.
Population density determined much. Indeed, aside from a combination of the 65 most-densely-populated counties, districts, and independent cities, Barack Obama lost the election. Most of those independent cities are in Virginia, but Barack Obama did well in those on the whole. Not only did he do well in Arlington and Richmond; he also did very well in such places as Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, and Harrisonburg.
But those 65 jurisdictions include the boroughs of New York, such independent cities as San Francisco, Denver, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis; and counties containing Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus (OH), Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Miami, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, the Quad Cities, the Twin Cities, Seattle, and Portland (ME or OR -- take your pick!)
In no recent election has there been so weak a link between income and voting. Obama did beautifully in such high-income areas as Winchester County in New York, Sacramento, Marin, San Mateo, and Monterrey Counties in California, and counties surrounding Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington. High income was long a good surrogate for partisan affiliation in America, but it was practically neutral in 2008.
People who might have voted for just about any Democrat in 1976 (Jimmy Carter won every former-Confederate state except Virginia) or the 1990s are often extremely unhappy with Barack Obama. On the other side, Barack Obama picked up huge numbers of votes from people who would have never voted for a Democrat in the 1990s. The former likely think President Obama horrible. The latter have yet to get fully confident with voting for Democrats of any kind.
Except that Barack Obama kept the unionized Northern blue-collar vote practically intact, never won over America's extreme upper class, didn't win over the Mormons, and failed badly in getting the ranch-and-oilfield vote, Barack Obama won much like Eisenhower did in the 1950s. Like Eisenhower, Obama did badly in the South. But like Obama would do 52 to 60 years later, Eisenhower won Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island together -- twice -- which no subsequent Republican would do since Ike. On the other side, Barack Obama won Virginia, which hasn't gone D except in electoral blowouts for the Democrats since 1948. Indiana is a one-time wonder.
By objective standards, the President to whom Obama is most likely to be seen in objective standards looks like Eisenhower, arguably the least-troublesome President since WWII. Economic stewardship? So far he is FDR. My investments have done well under President Obama, thank you. War and peace? He got us out of one troublesome war not of his making (but at least Harry Truman had an iron-clad excuse for the Korean War). Major legislation? For two years only LBJ surpasses him. Avoiding scandals and diplomatic/military debacles? Check.
Barack Obama never promised to be as big a maven of free enterprise as his awful predecessor, but America is
less socialist (from the standpoint of government ownership and management of productive assets) than when he became President. Think about it: Dubya stumbled into 'receivership socialism' as the economy melted down and giant enterprises failed. Many of the receivership assets have since been privatized.
So he provoked a right-wing reaction that manifested itself in the loud, strident, and partly-successful Tea Party. Sure -- but his economic rescue of many people who never would vote for him allowed the groups that funded the Tea Party movement to have the funds with which to contest him as President.
Barack Obama became President in the toughest time to be President since the 1930s. Reagan had it easy in contrast to Obama. The first year and a half of the economic meltdown beginning in the autumn of 2007 looks much like the first year and a half of the economic meltdown beginning in the autumn of 1929. The difference between the two meltdowns is that the one beginning in 1929 kept getting worse after the spring of 1931, and the one starting in the autumn of 2007 began to reverse in the spring of 2009. By 2020 we are going to see how good a President Obama really was. Either some Democrat completes the job that Obama started, or some Republican wins in 2016, probably bungles the Obama economy into an economic meltdown like that beginning in 2007 (if not worse). If the Republican nominee who becomes President and tries to win a macho duel with Vladimir Putin -- then we will miss Barack Obama.
Good stewardship of the economy? As good as possible. Effective foreign policy? Of course -- and so far he has solved more problems (one of them whacked in Abbottabad, Pakistan) than he has created. Avoiding scandals? Even Jimmy Carter had Bert Lance. Change? We got it when we needed it most.
