it's only downhill from here

though I'm not particularly worried about a Clinton presidency, the idea of an obligatory change doesn't really come with much hope for better lately.

GOBAMA!

Then the media having bursts of truth every now and then.

Although blocked by the GOP congress after his first two years, he managed to guide the nation through a rough time with aplomb.

It's actually just a usually wins, but apparently the approval rating of a sitting president's is the single largest individual factor in which party wins in an election. One of our presidents' biggest tasks is getting that approval rating up in the last year, when they're supposedly "lame ducks," a role Obama has declined.

The Republican leadership, members of the Kochtopus, etc., are going to be praying for disasters they can attack Obama on between now and November 8. It also makes things like approving his SCOTUS nominee even more problematic since it is desperately important to them to block anything and everything that could raise Obama's approval rating.

Sorry, just read back and realized I jumped from thinking from your "retrospective" to "it's not over until it's over." You are so right. I often think about that when considering what he's accomplished, and I'm genuinely looking forward to the view back.

He will vote for Bernie. He knows he must.

...much more popular in retrospect than he was at the time...

So have I.

So has Hillary.

In 1963, the president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans was Hillary Rodham. It was the Civil Rights movement that changed her.

Barack Hussein Obama II, President of the United States of America, has to all public knowledge been a Democrat.

I don't know you so I'll take your word on it.

I have not been a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. I've been a card carrying member of the Liberal Democrats in England and Scotland. Yet parties can go sour... mine went into coalition government with the £#!*ing Tories.

As a girl she participated as a non-voting minor in an organization for a short while, because her family wanted her to.

Elizabeth Warren was a Republican until her mid to late 40s. Voted for Ronald Reagan.

I was glad to have my part in him eclipsing the Bush crime family regime and knew he had an uphill battle. Despite that, I never went for the "3 dimensional chess" bullshit; being too cynical: not by formation, but experience.

Fast forward: It's more than disheartening to see the only time he really used the bully pulpit with any visceral force was to push the TPP. In paralell, it was/is THE ONLY time he seeked....and got...support from the GOP that heretofore opposed him.

What does THAT tell us?

( wrong answer is 4-dimensional chess )

that show he had the votes for that in the Congress or Senate.

year and just focus on our economic disaster. Obama refused to wait for Obamacare plan and pushed on with Healthcare plans and Americas economic disaster at the same time.

Single payer, public option and medicare for aged 50 and up were all mentioned/discussed with republicans trying to drag everything out as long as possible.

If Obama had waited that year like republicans tried, we wouldn't have anything today.

Yes, we still need single payer or medicare for all, a NOT for profit healthcare system.

Wouldn't you agree today with insurance not able to kick-out and/or refuse people is better then what it was when Obama took office?

He's been working on 'trade-treaty' with Asian-pacific countries for almost 7 years. Along with the other TPP signer Countries like Australia and Canada.

Ground-trade treaties "contracts with countries" like the TPP these days fade away to internet based commerce to move 'retail consumer products' that's where our 'trade' future will be based. Other then perishable agriculture. (anything needed fresh that can't be frozen/chemically stored/packaged in non-O2- for shipments)

excluding of course the time before I was aware of anything

When liberal Democrats pressed him to promote progressive social programs, he would often point out that he had not won a mandate and remind them that he first had to be reelected.

Kennedy had campaigned on the slogan of “getting America moving again” (which the Nixon campaign staff had privately derided as the peristalsis plan). But, recovery from the 1958 recession had been very sluggish and unemployment remained perilously high—6.8% just after he took office. The Council of Economic Advisers urged him to attack unemployment with New Deal style spending but the president was worried that a large deficit ($7 billion) would be politically untenable in 1964.

Kennedy had won the battle but lost the war—the price increase was canceled but U.S. Steel also announced that its new plants would be built abroad.

The president finally decided that only a bold domestic program, including tax cuts, would restore his political momentum. Declaring that the absence of recession is not tantamount to economic growth, the president proposed in 1963 to cut income taxes from a range of 20-91% to 14-65% He also proposed a cut in the corporate tax rate from 52% to 47%.

and Obama had much less to work with than JFK.
But in truth I was a toddler when JFK was elected...so I don't any any real recollection of his administration...other than remembering crying when we heard he was killed.

Not even a close contest.

before Obama came on the screen.

trump's rise has ensured that 1200 radio stations are more focused on the republican problems of unity and excusing trump than on swiftboating dems and attacking obama.

here's the math:

at a cheap $1000/hr x 15hrs/day x 1200 stations, rw talk radio is worth 4.68 BIL$/ year or 390MIL$ /month FREE for coordinated global warming denial, pro republican wall st think tank propaganda, free market deregulation bullshit, swiftboating, and the hate and fear used to get people to vote republican.

instead of being dedicated to driving down obama's numbers that giant PSYOPS has been diverted to republican problems.

looks pretty damn good.

If he was a Republican, he would never have been able to run in the primaries. That is why Bernie recently had to register as a Democrat.

that fact. And I am too respectful to contradict him.

...by that score. After all, at one time, Republicans were the progressives and the party of the inner city who fought against slavery. Democrats were the party of the South and slavery. Woodrow Wilson was a racist that might even make Donald Trump blush.

Yes, Bernie Sanders has expressed his opposition to free trade deals, but long before Sanders, there was Republican President Herbert Hoover who won the Presidency by campaigning against predatory free trade:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act

As the global economy entered the first stages of the Great Depression in late 1929, the USA's main goal emerged to protect American jobs and farmers from foreign competition. Reed Smoot championed another tariff increase within the USA in 1929, which became the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill. In his memoirs, Smoot made it abundantly clear:

"The world is paying for its ruthless destruction of life and property in the World War and for its failure to adjust purchasing power to productive capacity during the industrial revolution of the decade following the war."[9]

Smoot was a Republican from Utah and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon, was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

When campaigning for president during 1928, one of Herbert Hoover's promises to help beleaguered farmers had been to increase tariffs of agricultural products. Hoover won, and Republicans maintained comfortable majorities in the House and the Senate during 1928. Hoover then asked Congress for an increase of tariff rates for agricultural goods and a decrease of rates for industrial goods.

And he can attest to that fact, being that he ran as a member of the Democratic Party for his entire career and won the Presidential Elections twice as a member of said party. Your definition is beyond absurd.

Keep on believing that.

They don't exist anymore.

In my eyes Hillary Clinton is a moderate Republican of sorts.... byt then Bernie to me is a moderate Democrat. Trump and Benito Mussolini in my eyes have a lot in common.

Obama has done more for Americans and the Democratic party than you could ever hope to do in your life.

This place has been taken over by people who have nothing to say except bashing Democrats.

He did a good job when we really needed a good president. He pulled the world back from the brink.

Love you woman!

Some jobs need term limits. The President of the United States could do with having a third term option. It wasn't until FDR that term limits were put into the constitution.

I shall miss him.

nt

Maybe not by a majority on this site tho.

Strange that a "Democratic" site needed to create a protected group for fans of one of the most successful Democratic Presdents ever.

But you're "fighting for the soul of the party"?
My ass you are.

They are either right wing trolls or anarchists.

Who have voted Greens for years.

the right wing lie and smear machine has new targets.

- Many Democrats would rather vote for him instead of the assumed nominee?

- Because he has really loosened up in his last year or two and seems like a nice guy, the sort of chap you'd want to lead a nation?

- Because to most supportive people with a transgender loved one, he's going down in history as our Abe Lincoln?

On that last one, he truly has played a nearly eight year long game that even now is setting up masterfully for the final play.

About the only places he's failed miserably would be his Corporatism streak and the way he's been asleep at the wheel regarding voting rights.

He believed too much that Republicans would make a fair compromise on many issues in the first few years.

He is not perfect, but we Democrats will miss him when he's gone.

These same shitheads who claimed George W Bush was a "popular wartime President" when his approvals were in the low 30's turned around and pretended that Obama (whose approvals never dropped below 40%) was "unpopular."

Of course his numbers should go up. I would hope they would anyway in comparison to those two horrible candidates.

Although I don't agree with him all the time, I dearly love the POTUS and will miss him very much.

His support for Hillary Clinton in the GE will help and should help in getting back some seats in Congress.

wait and see

I have disagreed with him on a lot of things, I think he has been too "centrist", but he has been a good president, the best in my 30 years of life. His foreign policy has been extremely good, with the only significant mistake being Libya.

People are comparing him to the two people most likeliest to replace him, both horrible candidates who would take this country backwards, and suddenly Barry doesn't seem so bad. If Americans had the option, they'd probably keep Obama in for a third term rather than be stuck with those two sorry excuses for candidates.