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Originally Posted by timg1414
I dont think he has lived up to my expectations but I also did not envision the economy tanking as bad as it did. I think he has lost a ton of political capital with the healthcare issue. I think this should have been a second term bill or at least a late first term type of bill. He is going to force through a bill that a lot of people dont like and its extremely expensive. He has wasted a lot of time on this issue and lost whatever minimal support he had across the aisle and from million Americans.
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Obama's best chance at getting health care passed is in his first year to two years in office given the result of the 2008 election for Congress and the majority Obama won by. Running healthcare during the late first term would have been disastrous. Doing it in the second term would be out of the question because for a lot of people I know who campaigned for him, their biggest issue was healthcare reform. The healthcare debate is exactly what it is and what it's been for 60 years. It's a third rail issue; a health care bill like this has never passed the House of Representatives and that is very significant. For the Republicans, like it or not, the bill is going to pass. And I don't see how Obama is "forcing" a bill through Congress. There was a year and a half long campaign for president in which health care was a top issue. When the people elected Obama, everyone knew that this was the kind of health care bill we would be getting.
As for the stimulus not stimulating, we're out of the "Bush recession" now. If we slide back in (Japan might because the Yen is too strong for the economy which could cause us to) then the stimulus will be a failure because it can't work then. The stimulus is a long term plan to pump money into the economy to bolster the economy through the recovery. If the economy slides because the world does, anyone should be free to call the stimulus a failure.
:lol It's all politics and most of these issues we're arguing are crap. Nothing is going to change in the short term. You can't just close Gitmo. You can't just pull the troops out of Iraq.
And for that matter, I fundamentally disagree with anyone who thinks we should pull out of Afghanistan. We were attacked on September 11, 2001.