In what ways has Obama corrected Bush's actions and errors?

Do you have a specific action/error, or is everything from Bushes tenure up for comment?

Well, we are out of Iraq, and Obama has stopped the torture of prisoners.

Obama actually got rid of Osama.

@filmfann I’m not a Bush fan, but the withdrawl from Iraq was according to the schedule that Bush set up, Obama tried to extend but was denied.

@phaedryx But didn’t the U.S. go to war in Iraq during the Bush administration?

The first thing that comes to mind for me is the rescinding of various executive orders given by Bush. Specifically, Obama rescinded the global gag rule, reinstated limits on executive privilege, and removed the prohibition on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

reasonable supreme court appointees

He got rid of DADT, and is in the process of getting rid of DOMA (though, technically, those are Clinton’s fuck-ups, but it’s not like Bush made it any better…)

Mostly Obama hasn’t been able to do much, because the Republican Congress has been very obstructionist. However, Obama did pass health care reform, which, while a pale shadow of what it needs to be, is a step in the right direction. He has also managed to do some things to stimulate the economy, although once again, because of the obstruction of Congress, he has not been able to do nearly enough.

Some of his biggest successes have been in foreign policy. Bush didn’t know Iran from his ass. Obama has Clinton on the case, and she has been doing an extraordinary job. Her handling of the Arab Spring is one example. And the administration has been doing its best to get out of the wars that Bush started, but that is easier said than done, as Bush well knew.

Well, he opened his mouth for one.

He staffed his administration with people who would give him dissenting opinions, instead of people telling him what he wanted to hear. I think this is one of the most critical differences.

” process of getting rid of DOMA..”

Yes!

@chyna absolutely, but that’s not what the question is asking. If Obama tried to extend the time in Iraq I don’t give him points for “correcting a Bush error.”

In addition to what others have pointed out, look at how he has handled Afghanistan and Libya.

Afghanistan is still a mess. But civilian deaths by NATO have decreased quite a bit since Obama took over (even as the Taliban has killed ever more civilians). He limited airstrikes in civilian areas. The “counterinsurgency” strategy has its critics, but much of that strategy involved safeguarding civilians. Bush, in comparison, left the war on autopilot and managed to kill many more civilians with a fraction of American forces with heavyhanded ROE. Those lives matter.

And while Libya wasn’t a “correction” of anything Bush did, I do see his handling of Libya and the Arab Spring in general as a general course correction for Bush’s imbecilic and dangerous foreign policy. What would Cheney have done in Libya? Occupied the country? Would Bush have been able to command that war without a single American dying and without putting any (non-spec-ops) boots on the ground, successfully, without the country descending into mass bloodshed or inflaming the entire Arab World? I certainly don’t think so.

That last bit is also important. Obama deserves credit for destroying al-Qaeda. Not just because he actually dedicated the resources to taking out bin Laden, but also because he robbed al-Qaeda of PR. He stopped torturing prisoners, he worked to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan, he supported the Arab Spring movement, he didn’t stay in Iraq like many Republicans wanted us to do, and when he got elected he offered an olive branch to Muslims in his Cairo speech. He refocused the military effort against al-Qaeda to targeted strikes with special forces and drones, rather than large-scale wars with many boots on the ground.

Foreign policy is the main power a president has, and it’s the main reason I will support Obama above the Republican trogodolytes.

I’m also surprised nobody mentioned Dodd-Frank. It’s flawed legislation, but it forces banks to maintain healthy capital levels which will go a long way to preventing overleveraging and another financial meltdown like the one Bush oversaw.

And Obama’s EPA is a huge improvement over Bush’s, which was completely muzzled. Obama’s EPA (rightfully) classifies CO2 as a pollutant, for example. It also actually regulates power plant pollutants and is in the process of regulating fracking.

And another thing, while I’m thinking of it. When was the last time Obama used fear of terrorism to score political points, or accused Republicans of capitulating towards terrorists? Oh, never? Remember how Bush and his supporters did that virtually every day?

He’s more articulate. Not as bumbling and strident about the Middle East/Arab nations. Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, that’s about all he’s done that’s a major improvement on Bush.

Open-ended warfare, drones, continuation of the Patriot Act, TSA, the “War on Drugs”, the bank bailouts, increased classification and secrecy, ongoing use of “signing statements”, overtly aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers. Half-assed attempts at stimulus, health-care reform… I could go on and on. We needed FDR, we got a mix of Bush and Hoover.

Again—he’s more polished, more articulate, less of a bumbler than Bush. But in terms of what they’ve done, they’re far more similar than you think.

@AngryWhiteMale, that’s incredibly uninformed. You don’t see a difference between using drones and invading a country with a large ground force, setting up checkpoints where hundreds of civilians end up getting shot, and dropping white phosphorus bombs on civilian areas?

I’m not saying you should support drone attacks; I think they’re probably counterproductive and probably immoral. But if you can’t see a difference between using drones to kill a hundred people and using an invading army to kill 10,000, I think you need your head examined.

And I also think it’s bizarre that you brought up FDR. Economically, Obama tried, and achieved, Keynesian stimulus like FDR did (though FDR had 67 dems in the senate and Obama had only 60, several of whom are corrupt). FDR, like Obama, also pulled back government spending too soon—though in Obama’s case that was not his fault but the Republicans’. So I’m not sure what you’re complaint is there.

And in terms of foreign policy, here you are complaining about the Patriot Act and warfare, while invoking the proud memory of the president who oversaw massive unconstitutional internments of Japanese civilians and who directed the most destructive bombing campaigns in history, killing literally hundreds of thousands of civilians in Axis and Japanese population centers? Did you not think this through?

And something else that I find infuriating:

“half-assed attempts at stimulus and health-care reform.”

1. Compared to what? Compared to absolutely nothing that Bush did?

2. How would you have done better? How would you have accomplished more comprehensive stimulus and health care reform and financial reform with only 60 Democratic senators, at least 5 of whom were blue dogs and/or actually corrupt and in bed with the industries supposed to be regulated? If you’re going to criticize Obama for not magically doing more on these issues, let’s hear your brilliant political plan on how he could have succeeded. I suspect it will involve the word “leadership” and probably not much else.

@Qingu, how is it “uninformed”? There’s certainly a difference, yes, but the end result is the same in both cases: a population that will be even more anti-American, more radicalized, and just as devastated. I find it interesting you say that drones are “probably immoral”; they are immoral, at least to me. Either they’re immoral or not; there’s no “probably”. The corporate media we have nowadays isn’t reporting on drones well (or barely at all; the best reporting is from alternate sources/overseas), but the drones have been killing and wounding two to three times as many civilians as they have actual, suspected, or supposed militants/”combatants”. I’m not looking at the scale here (which is what you appear to be doing, trying to say that proportionally one is somehow worse than the other); I’m looking at the damage that both do, and the fact that both are wrong, morally and in other ways. Invading with an army is unnecessary; so is using drones. At least you can run away from an army, or organize opposition to invading forces. You can’t exactly do that with a drone. Both are acts of aggression, and both will result (and have resulted) in consequences neither side will like, possibly for decades to come.

Even though the war in Iraq has drawn down for the most part, it isn’t completely over, and we are still in Afghanistan (where, surprise! we still have people on the ground). We’re also involved in covert/undeclared wars in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and North Africa in general (Libya, particularly). So sorry, no, I’m not going to let Obama off the hook here. That isn’t to say it’s solely his fault; many in his administration and in Congress share the blame as well, and of course people from the previous administration. The mess we’re in has hundreds of fathers (and quite a few mothers as well…).

There’s nothing wrong or “bizarre” about bringing up FDR. First, people compare presidents with other presidents all the time. Given the choice between FDR and Obama, I’ll take FDR, thank you. While Obama did attempt a Keynesian stimulus, it was far too little. He also could have emulated FDR with establishing programs similar to the CCC, the WPA, and other work programs, but he didn’t. As a result, the stimulus he put in place was too little, and all it did was stanch the bleeding somewhat. It was not enough, and anyone with common sense can look back and see it merely put a band-aid on a much larger wound.

The numbers in the Senate are irrelevant; 60 senators would have been plenty, if the Senate wasn’t mucking around with rules to cover their asses. The two-thirds rule is just a bunch of games, centered around “tradition”; in reality, if the Democrats had really wanted to, they could’ve pushed for quite a few things with the majority they did had, assuming they also had Obama leading the way. Unfortunately, Obama didn’t use as much political capital as should have, and the Democrats didn’t stand up either. It’s part of why they took such a beating in 2010.

You’re correct that FDR pulled back spending too soon, and caused an economic reversal in the late 1930’s. But we weren’t discussing FDR in the first place, were we? This thread and my comments were about Obama, not FDR.

As for whose “fault” it is, there’s plenty to go around, from “helpless” Democrats to obstructionist Republicans to a corporatist president. They’re all in Wall Street’s pocket, and they’re all invested in maintaining the status quo (just as Bush was, which is why I say there’s not a whole lot of difference between the two, when it comes to major policies).

As for foreign policy, FDR was flawed; I prefer his domestic policies to his foreign policies. Yes, EO 9066 and its attendant decrees will always be a stain on FDR’s legacy. I’m not unaware of the damage done there; family friends were interned at Manzanar and Heart Mountain during the war. As for WWII, there were enough atrocities to go around on all sides. No one government has its hands clean of blood in that conflict. But again, that’s a separate conversation from this thread.

Not sure why you say “Did you not think this through?” I certainly did; it’s still my opinion there are very few substantive differences between Obama and Bush where it counts (perhaps the environment, I’ll give you that. But Obama is another in a long line of leaders not doing a whole lot about the environmental disasters waiting in the wings, not to mention his administration gave BP what was essentially a slap on the hand for their destruction of the Gulf Coast, so I’m not really willing to give Obama a pass on the environment either…). Most of the differences are cosmetic; comportment, intelligence, the ability to know when to keep one’s mouth shut…

You, on the other hand, seem to want to go on a tangent about FDR; if you like, set up a new thread, and I’d be happy to discuss the merits (and lack thereof) of FDR over there.

@Qingu, my previous response to you was getting awfully long, so answering you again here.

Compared to what he could have done. Bush and the Republicans in general were so discredited in 2008 an actual donkey could have run for President that year and won. It’s why Obama, who was a freshman Senator, ran then. If ever a black man was going to win, it was 2008 (I always thought a woman would win before a black. Nice to have been proven wrong. As it is, racism will cost him as many votes this time as last, perhaps more this time around due to the failure of a good number of his policies). He won with such a decisive margin and such political goodwill, not to mention majorities in Congress, that he had great political opportunities to spend his political capital to change quite a bit. Despite the corruption in Congress (and I agree with you, 99.9% of the, on both sides, have sold out to the special interests that bought them), the President, by virtue of being the President and the leader of his party, has a tremendous amount of influence and a bully pulpit to go with that. He didn’t have to wholly emulate FDR (or LBJ, or any other president that pushed any type of progressive domestic agenda), but he could have argued for a stronger stimulus, he could have argued for rolling back Bush’s civil liberties abuses, he could have definitively closed Guantanamo, he could have actually supported transparency… you get the picture.

What he’s done is talk the talk, but he hasn’t walked the walk on a lot of the promises and theories he’s espoused in his speeches and statements. He was way too cautious, and lost whatever opportunities he had to really force some changes. I will say it didn’t help that the Democrats were playing a “me too” game in response to the Republicans, and then the Republican victories in 2010 made things even more difficult. I could go on, but I think you get the general point…?

It would take me an entire essay (which would bore most people here) to explain how I would have done better. Referring back to the previous answer, I would have requested a MUCH larger stimulus, and then negotiated down from there if I had to, rather than requesting the puny amount that Obama did. I would not have secretly negotiated away universal health care or the public option in backroom meetings, as Obama did, and thus limited my options on health care (I certainly wouldn’t have co-opted Romney’s plan, that’s for sure). As for financial reform, I wouldn’t have let TARP/ the bank bailout continue as it did, and I would have held Wall Street’s feet to the fire, not let them off with a slap on the wrist. Believe me, there is a huge amount of anger against the banks, and I would have really tapped into that. There’s a reason why the movement last year was called “Occupy Wall Street.” Marshaling populist anger and making it work for me is what I would have done—something that Obama apparently didn’t feel he needed to do, or understood how to do.

Again, as I said before, 60 senators is a majority no matter how you look at it, and there were ways Obama and the Democratic leadership could have made that work for them, but they insisted on abiding by archaic rules, instead of moving to eliminate the two-thirds rule. Reid and the leadership are now belatedly waking up to the fact that maybe they should’ve done that, but at this point, I’m not sure they can toss the rules anytime soon… Obama could’ve used the bully pulpit/worked behind the scenes to shame those Blue Dogs and nudge them in certain ways. LBJ, for all his flaws, was a master at this. Read Caro’s biographies of him sometime.

Yes, it does involve leadership, because that’s what a president does: he LEADS. He also negotiates, cajoles, pushes, and in general, maneuvers his way into deals and legislation that advances his agenda. I think Obama is a corporatist, but I also think he’s in way over his head. He was a newcomer to Congress, and didn’t stick around long enough to really learn the ropes before he ran for office. That didn’t serve him well.

By the way, sarcasm does not become you. I don’t need to present a “brilliant plan,” nor do I expect you to. I merely expressed my opinion that I feel Obama and Bush do not have a whole lot of differences between them in terms of how they are governing, and anyone is free to agree or disagree with me.

@AngryWhiteMale, “There’s certainly a difference, yes, but the end result is the same in both cases: a population that will be even more anti-American, more radicalized, and just as devastated.”

No. The end result is not the same, and it’s foolish and insensitive to the literally thousands of innocent lives that were lost under Bush’s foreign to equate the two.

Let me give you a concrete example of how the two president’s foreign policies differ greatly.

• In 2004 the US led a major operation to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah from insurgents. They heavily bombed the city, used white phosphorus (widely considered a war crime), and shot heavily artillery that destroyed much of the place. 800 innocent civilians died, possibly many more.

• In 2010, the US led a major operation to retake the Taliban-controlled community of Marja in Afghanistan. The Americans used ROE based on the new “counterinsurgency” strategy that Obama pushed. 28 innocent civilians died.

Less people lived in Marja, but not 10 times less. And the Americans were facing relatively similar-sized insurgent forces. And you’re claiming that the “result is the same”? Absolute bullshit. More than an order of magnitude fewer innocent people were killed—because Obama’s approach to warfare differed greatly from Bush’s, because he told his generals to limit airstrikes and artillery, because he focused effort away from simply killing lots of enemy soldiers. Americans retook Kandarar in 2011 with similarly low levels of civilian casualties.

Now let’s talk about drones. Somewhere between ~1800 and 3100 people have been killed by drones since the program started in 2004; most under Obama. That’s a lot of people. Some of them are known militants. Almost all of them were adult males traveling with known militants. You can argue, and I’d agree, that this fact doesn’t make them fair targets. But it’s also unclear if they are innocent civilians. In any case—the number of innocent civilians killed by drones, whatever it is, absolutely pales to the number of innocent civilians killed in Iraq under Bush—over 100,000. It pales to the number of innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan under Bush’s brutal and non-targeted ROE. It also pales to the number of innocent civilians killed by the Pakistani army when they invaded the lawless northwest region in 2010, ostensibly to root out terrorists—more than 40,000. 1,000 civilians vs. 40,000 civilians—that’s not “exactly the same,” again, that’s more than an order of magnitude.

This is not just some abstract numbers game. These are innocent people. You don’t have to agree that we should be fighting in these places. But you should acknowledge that, under Obama, American military violence has resulted in many, many less deaths than it has under Bush.

I’ll address domestic politics in the next post.

• “He also could have emulated FDR with establishing programs similar to the CCC, the WPA, and other work programs, but he didn’t.”

How? 40 senators can filibuster it. And at least 45 senators opposed such ideas.

• “The numbers in the Senate are irrelevant; 60 senators would have been plenty, if the Senate wasn’t mucking around with rules to cover their asses. The two-thirds rule is just a bunch of games, centered around “tradition”; in reality, if the Democrats had really wanted to, they could’ve pushed for quite a few things with the majority they did had,”

Actually, no. You have it backwards. The tradition is majority votes. You really do need 60 votes to do anything in the modern senate. Which is the entire reason why Obama’s policies ended up less ambitious than FDR’s.

• “As for whose “fault” it is, there’s plenty to go around, from “helpless” Democrats to obstructionist Republicans to a corporatist president. They’re all in Wall Street’s pocket, and they’re all invested in maintaining the status quo”

You sound like a child. “Everyone is the same.” “They’re all corrupt.” Nothing is easier to say than that. In reality, people with political power have varying levels of corruption. Some congressmen are staunchly opposed to Wall Street. Some, correctly, acknowledge that Wall Street as an institution plays an important role in the global economy and should not be blown up. Some, correctly, understand Wall Street as a major political force and thus negotiate with it as you would negotiate with Russia or China over economic policy, instead of outright declaring war with them. I see Obama as in the latter camp, and I have no idea why you think otherwise beyond a childish view of how politics works.

• “Obama could’ve used the bully pulpit/worked behind the scenes to shame those Blue Dogs and nudge them in certain ways.”

Yep, I had a feeling you would say this. “If only Obama used MAGIC LEADERSHIP, he could have convinced the corrupt blue dog senators to overcome the filibuster that they supported. Nonsense.

• “What he’s done is talk the talk, but he hasn’t walked the walk on a lot of the promises and theories he’s espoused in his speeches and statements.”
Politifact shows that he has “walked the walk” on many of his promises, including many important ones. He also compromised on many more, and is actively pursuing many more. In particular, he promised health care and financial reform and he delivered. The final legislation was not very different from what he promised in both cases. It’s true that he was not able to achieve some of his promises, and if you thought that he would accomplish everything he set out to do, you must have been high.

• “he could have definitively closed Guantanamo,”
Nope. Needed Congress. Once again, statements like this only show that you don’t actually understand how politics in this country works. I find it infuriating that people have the strongest feelings about subjects that they know very little about. I also find it infuriating that people like yourself, who railed about executive power-grabs and excess under Bush, are now castigating Obama for actually following the separation of powers.

• “I would not have secretly negotiated away universal health care or the public option in backroom meetings, as Obama did,”

Great. How would you have gotten 60 senators to vote for it? When there were clearly not 60 votes thanks to Lieberman and Brown and probably a handful of Blue Dogs as well? Let me guess. Magic leadership.

• “I wouldn’t have let TARP/ the bank bailout continue as it did,”

Then you would have been responsible for the complete collapse of liquidity and credit in a depressed economy.

• “I don’t need to present a “brilliant plan,” nor do I expect you to. I merely expressed my opinion that I feel Obama and Bush do not have a whole lot of differences between them in terms of how they are governing, and anyone is free to agree or disagree with me.”

I do disagree with you, because your “opinion” is clearly poorly-thought-out nonsense. And the fact that we both have the right to express opinions is a complete red-herring in this discussion. Yes, I am not going to summon the gestapo to clap you in irons if you repeatedly and falsely assert that “Obama is just the same as Bush with a few cosmetic differences.” Now that we agree that free speech exists and people have opinions, I look forward to your actually defending your opinion.

Being a partner of Europe instead of a bully.