Will President Obama be elected for a second term?

We can’t know the future, but I, for one, will vote for him.

I am also hoping that the Teabaggers and traditional conservative Republicans will turn on each other and diminish Republican cohesion in Congress.

No good answer. The next two years will be very different with republicans in control of the house. He may get credit if things go wrong because he can blame the republicans or if things go right he may be able to say he overcame their obstructionism.

But sometimes it all backfires.

Unless the democrats can get their shit together and learn how to run an election based on something besides, “Well, at least he’s not George W.”, no.

George is gone and, no matter who is to blame for the current economic situation, everyday folks want to know what is going to be done about it. They want to see that something is being done about it. Statistics, projections, and pretty speeches don’t mean shit to voters who are wondering if they are going to lose their house or what’s going to happen to them now if they get sick instead of in 2014.

Totally.

Depends on who the republicans put up there.

@Whitsoxdude hopefully Palin.

@Blondesjon Luckily, I think they’ll figure it out. They probably knew they would get hurt this time around and didn’t want to use their best techniques. They got two years to put together a really good strategy.

@roundsquare . . . You are talking about the same party that let George 43 and republicans make the ‘04 election about gay marriage and not about the fact that we were neck deep in a very unpopular war.

I have my doubts about their “best techniques”.

they need a liberal karl rove

@Blondesjon Fair point… but thats not just the party, its also the fact that Americans treat abortion and gay marriage as the end all be all of politics. But yeah, you are right, I might be being a bit too optimistic.

Anyway, let me amend it to “they MIGHT figure it out.”

Ah yes. Another concise, well-reasoned critique of the president.

If he chooses not to run? No, he won’t get a second term.
If another Democratic candidate is picked as the nominee? No, he won’t get a second consecutive term. Hello, mister Cleveland.
If he’s against Palin? Yes, he’ll get a second term.
If he’s against McCain? Yes, he’ll get a second term.
If there’s a separation between the Republican party and Tea party? Yes, he’ll get a second term. a la 1968 or 1864

If the Republitea party puts out a single, strong candidate, I have very high expectations that Obama won’t win.

@noelleptc see this

If the republican’s sit there and do nothing for the next two years I think the Americans will boot them out again. And by the looks of it, it appears as if that’s what they are planning to do. They’re not willing to compromise. If there is no compromise, nothing will be done and we will have another democratic president even if it isn’t President Obama.

Seriously? You looked at some of Obama’s accomplishments from @Sarcasm‘s link and are saying “what else you got, Obama?” Pretty ironic. What else do you want/need from him?

@noelleptc I misunderstood. But don’t you think that link does answer the question “what else you got?”

I’m not trying to be antagonistic, honestly. But when you say “other Presidents have done that and more”, to what are you referring?

I get interested in these details because there is so much misinformation out there.

So you’re saying any document a president signs is an equal accomplishment?

Obama has accomplished more in two years than the last two presidents did in 16, and thats simple fact. Like his policies or not he has accomplished a great deal. Healthcare reform, and finance reform alone are once in a generation pieces of legislation (the last time a major healthcare was done was medicaid/medicare, and the last time major financial legislation was done was during the great depression). Not to mention he’s handling two wars and frankly doing well with both of them, passed a stimulus bill that will rebuild infrastructure for the next decade, lowered taxes to the lowest point in nearly 70 years…. People seem to overlook all he’s accomplished in favor of the things he hasn’t. Give the man time.

As far as getting re-elected, I think he will be. The Republicans don’t have any new candidates to throw out there, and once an election primary gets going the public will see and be reminded they don’t like the likes of Romney, Palin, Gingrich, or whoever else.

@noelleptc Sounds sexy ;)

@noelleptc Sounds good.

@tedd Please tell me how Obama has accomplished more than President Clinton. I can’t wait to hear this.

@noelleptc Here’s a tip: don’t go to work angry

Say the United States is a large corporation. This corporation, due to mismanagement by a former CEO, is now running deep in the red. The stockholders bring in a new CEO who has assured them that he will bring a revolutionary set of ideas that will once again make the company profitable.

After two years the company is still running in the red and many of the revolutionary ideas are actually just prettified pandering. The CEO begins to blame not only the infrastructure of the corporation but the stockholders themselves as well. In most businesses this CEO would be looking at losing his job.

Sure, he may have kinda revamped the company health insurance plan and bailed out a few key employees by handing out raises, but the fact remains that the business he is running is laying off it’s workers at an alarming rate and still operating in the red.

@jonsblond Please right now off the top of your head… tell me the biggest thing president Clinton accomplished. I can think of two things he accomplished on a whole, but neither are single pieces of legislation. And while both are impressive, they do not combined equal the magnitude of an accomplishment that healthcare alone is.

But I’m interested in hearing what you can think of.

@Blondesjon The private sector has seen job growth for 9 straight months in this country. Not nearly to the level we would hope (say, the exact opposite of 700k a month it was losing when Obama took office).... but still, 9 straight months of job growth.

And if he was blaming the infrastructure and stuff, I’m sorry to say he’d be right. We’ve spent the last 20 years putting businesses into too much power without enough checks on them (thanks Reagan). And our system is full of flaws, take campaign finance for example.

But as far as operating in the red, he never sugar coated it and said we wouldn’t be. Cainsian economics, he believes it and follows it, and from the outset said we’d be spending money to keep people employed. Its kind of hard to argue, but many economists think we’d be IN another depression, with near 20% unemployment, had the stimulus not passed… and they even go as far as arguing that the President screwed up by making ⅓ of it tax cuts, and making the actual spending too small.

@tedd

Clinton’s first two years
(Brady Bill and Family and Medical Leave Act are just two accomplishments, you can read the rest)

Clinton’s Presidency (More than 22 million jobs were created in less than eight years. I’ll let you read the rest.)

@jonsblond Yah the jobs were one of the things I could think of, lowering the annual deficit to 18 billion by his last year in office was the other. Your first two acts do not even come close to the accomplishment that healthcare is. I don’t think you quite understand how BIG an accomplishment that is. It is on par with social security, medicare/medicaid, only just shy of suffrage in my opinion.

@tedd Did you even read my links? I’ll have this discussion in six years, if Obama is re-elected. I’m sorry, I still disagree with your initial statement that Obama has done more than Clinton.

@jonsblond I skimmed it, I’m fairly familiar with Clintons accomplishments because I spend wayyyyyy too much time reading about this stuff.

Look at it like this. What can you find on Clinton’s resume, and in fact combined with Bushes, that equals….. Healthcare for up to 40 million Americans….Pulling 100k troops out of Iraq and having a set leave date on the remaining 50k (who are in support/backup roles now).... putting more troops into Afghanistan where they shoulda been in the first place….. negotiating the shrinking of the worlds nuclear weapons by ⅓ with Russia…. Passing the first major financial legislation since the 1930’s….. and passing a Stimulus bill that likely saved us from a great depression.

My crystal ball says yes. My intellect says probably. My heart says it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Clinton was lucky he was president during the dot com boom. He did nothing to create jobs himself. And he moved so far to the middle. That is the only reason he got reelected. In 1996 I became green. Clinton made me loathe Dems. for a long time.

@tedd I believe the links I provided show you just how much Clinton has done that equals the little that Obama has.

I can tell you this. Under the Clinton administration, my family started to receive the earned income tax credit. Under the Obama administration, my husband still has no health insurance. He (Obama) hasn’t done shit for our family. When and if he does, I’ll give him praise.

@tedd . . . That is great. If I were an English teacher I would give you an ‘A’ on your paper.

Unfortunately, I am not an English teacher. I am just one of the millions of everyday Americans that couldn’t give two shits about an academic debate on Obama’s economic theories. As impressive and sweeping as you believe stimulus and healthcare to be, it doesn’t change the fact that if right now I were to get sick or hurt, I would be footing 100% of the bill. It also doesn’t change the fact that if I were to lose my job right now, I’d still be facing a 10% unemployment rate. No breadlines here but not a lot of prospects either.

This is why the democrats lost so badly this time around. Everyday people don’t want to be told how great their leaders ideas are. They don’t want to be told that we are our own worst enemy when it comes to voting. They really don’t even give a fuck where the blame lies. They just want to know that they will have a roof over their heads and dinner on the table every night. The want to know that they will have a job to get up a go to the next day.

by the way, under clinton we only had to worry about who he was fucking not about how much we were getting fucked

I do not have an answer, either. he came into office with a mess on his hands leftover from previous administrations. i think he has made some good moves for the country, but mostly bad moves. giving out $250 to individuals was not a good idea. this money could have been used in more positive way for our country. the drug addicts and alcoholics loved their windfall.

We will just have to wait and see.

President Obama has done a great job so far considering the mess he walked into. People can’t expect him to snap his fingers and fix everything. It’s going to take time. The economy is getting better, there are more jobs, and America is slowly recovering. Unfortunately, people don’t care to see what he HAS accomplished, they like to concentrate on what hasn’t been done. A country doesn’t recover from a recession in two years and the recession sure as hell didn’t start when President Obama took office. This is the mess that he walked into and he’s doing what he can to make it better. And maybe if the republicans tried a little harder to cooperate with him, more would be accomplished. The sad part is that while we’re all fighting against each other, other countries are thriving and becoming more stable and successful. We are causing our own downfall. Sadly, I fear that I might actually live to see the fall of the U.S. and we’ll have nobody else to blame but ourselves.

I think so but it will be with a Republican majority in Congress. Gridlock city.

He will most certainly. Why? Because the Republicans might not be able to find a qualified intellectual moderate conservative candidate. And as far as I know there’s no majority for ultra-conservative zealots like Sarah Palin.

@mattbrowne . . . you overestimate the average american voter

@mattbrowne After seeing what just happened in the mid-term elections, how can you have such confidence that American voter values intelligence over rhetoric?

@cockswain . . . Just because a voter’s ideology is not the same as yours doesn’t mean that the voter chose rhetoric nor does it make you intelligent.

It just makes you a sore loser.

@jonsblond I agree I should construct a more well-reasoned argument than that. From my point of view, it wasn’t actually the ideology people were voting for so much as they were duped into buying a lot of misinformation spread by the likes of Beck, Palin, Hannity, Limbaugh, and the usual gang of idiots. I saw some poll recently (can’t remember where) but something like 40% of Americans think Fox News is the least biased source. If the things said on there were mostly true, Obama would be a pretty bad president indeed. As it turns out, much of the accusations against him from the get go have been greatly exaggerated to completely fabricated.

For example, the trumpeting call of the Tea Party has been “stop Obama and his big government spending! He’s just bailing out banks, and we don’t have jobs!” And he’s been foolishly called a socialist, a Muslim, and a bunch of other dumb things. While there are many conservatives who have solid reasons for disliking him, it is my contention that so much of the animosity towards him is unfounded. The fact he has been pinned with failed policies that have caused this recession is ridiculous. The GOP figured out a message that Americans want to hear, about reducing gov’t and spending, but few people beyond Rand Paul have actually outlined how they’d accomplish this.

I could just go on and on, but it really wouldn’t serve much purpose. I’m not a blind Obama supporter. I’m very resentful of the deceptions out there that have caused the ridiculously short-term memory of American voters to apparently switch philosophy for non-substantive reason.

I personally take great pains to ensure I have the most reasonable approximation of the truth. It’s sort of a mission with me. I promise you not everyone reads multiple versions of an article to feel relatively comfortable repeating the information.

Besides, you are absolutely correct in stating @mattbrowne is overestimating the average American voter. Too many of us are an easily led and divided bunch.

You’re a Packers fan, and thus my brother.

By the way, I’m not trying to imply I’m more intelligent than a conservative because of my political beliefs. I realize what I wrote made it come off that way, but that wasn’t my intention nor my belief. Generally, all people are equally capable of reasoning given the same information to work with.

But I thought the ultra conservatives are still a minority in the Republican party. Isn’t this the case?

Well how else do you explain the results of the mid-term elections? Not cut and dried that moderate Republicans would vote for Obama over an ultra-conservative.

More specifically, blue dog democrats got pounded.