Posts tagged Barack Obama
Serving the robot community since 2011
The Obama Memos: The Making of a Post-Post-Partisan Presidency
Ryan Lizza from The New Yorker provides a unique and fascinating view of how decisions have been made inside the Obama presidency. This is essential reading for all those liberals who think Obama hasn’t done enough and for those conservatives who think he’s too radical. Lizza had access to hundreds of memoranda written inside the White House that provide insight on how Obama has adjusted his policies to meet political realities. The short version: It’s not as easy to get things done as you’d think, even less so when the opposition party is determined to stop you at every turn. Obama’s goal of changing Washington, D.C.’s toxic partisan atmosphere seems farther away than ever, but he has still had many significant accomplishments.
Ask yourselves — where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance?
What [Drew] Westen seems to have wanted was the Democratic version of George W. Bush, contemptuous of his opponents, ruthless in his often unconstitutional determination to get his agenda through, divisive and polarizing. But Obama would not have won election on those grounds and did not have a mandate for that. He was elected as a moderate Democrat, prepared to engage any pragmatic solution to obvious problems, while not splitting an already polarized country even further.
(Source: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
[President Obama] is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
(Source: The New York Times)
