Calling healthcare reform “a subsidy to the health insurers” is rather a stretch. A desire to give more money to the HMOs is clearly not what motivates those pushing for the bill. Neither in all likelyhood will it be the bills impact. While the individual manadate means more customers for the insurers, they also face curbs on their more predatory activities and the bills contains(some)cost control measures.

I am afraid I must also disagree that “Obama is becoming worse than Bush with his extensions of arbitrary power, civil and human rights abuses.” Guntanamo is being shut, KSM will be tried by civilian court rather than a military tribunal and the CIA has been ordered to stop using “enhance interogation.”

Psi,

I think your point cuts both ways. If it is too soon to say the stimulus has worked then it is too soon to say its failed.

I would ,however, still expect the extra demand produced by the stimulus to boost the economy. Concerns about “debt payments, on tax and crounding out” are really more relevant in an economy doing rather better than ours. For example, there is not much private sector investment to crowd out at the moment.

Yes some of the money has probably gone on pork but frankly it’s less of a waste of money to build musuems of South Dakotian culture or whatever than it is to write unemployment cheques.

Sara,

I have indeed thought about writing a blog: http://sharkattackuk.blogspot.com/

My posts tailed off when I started university
and stopped altogether when I became a councillor

Mark M

Of course, the reply will always be ‘it would have been worse without it’ – love an unprovable statement, it justifies almost any action.

As for the disgusting ‘peace’ prize, the man had the nerve to accept the award with a speech attempting to justify war.

I also think his liberal supporters should take a moment to think about the continuation of rendition and torture by the US government and the further erosions of civil liberties and secret negotiations of ACTA (apparently Hollywood needs protecting in the name of national security).

It is not enough to not be the GOP, it seems like Obama is becoming worse than Bush with his extensions of arbitrary power, civil and human rights abuses and continuations of murderous wars.

If anything, Obama is a victim of the hype he created around himself. However, in order to win the election, I can’t blame him for campaigning in the way he did.

As ‘psi’ pointed out it is too early to tell what the full effects of the stimulus package will be. What completely shook me, however, was an interview with Obama (which I’m curently trying to dig up) where the interviewer asked about specifics and Obama gave the impression that it didn’t matter how the money was being spent just that more money being thrown everywhere was unequivocally good. Obviously I’m suspicious of that answer.

Obama has not been a friend to free-trade which is worrying and I would obviously reform health care in completely the other direction (Doug, I have used this website time and time again. http://freemarketcure.com/). Obama hasn’t rid the US of stupid, stupid rules e.g. heath coverage can’t be taken from companies outside ones domicile state.

The GOP is in a bad, bad way. They won’t see the error of their ways until they lose to Obama a second time. Which they will.

Anyway, your main criticism of the President seems to be his healthcare bill. You can oppose his approach, and though you may have an alternative yourself Sarah (not elucidated here) it’s pretty clear that – overall- the GOP did not and it is they who must primarily be held responsible for the partisan bickering. The Bill has strengths and weaknesses, but in the US system of split powers, the power of Congress means that the President will not get exactly what he wants. This watered down-bill, with Stupak’s amendment etc, is clearly not what Obama personally would want but probably the best he could get in this environment.

The stimulus has been hampered by the lack of “shovel ready” projects. As a result,much of its impact has still to be felt. Maybe it’s too late, but it’s too early to say it’s had no effect.

Sarah, please give specific examples of the money you feel has been wasted. That said, Obama’s anti-free trade actions in the stimulus and elsewhere deserve criticism.

Obama’s declining ratings are a little concerning, but I doubt they’re signficantly beyond the norm. The comparison with Bill is complicated by the much more difficult economic situation – and unlike Clinton, Obama has taken on issues like healthcare, which in the short term was never likely to be popular. Bush would have had similar ratings at this point, had it not been for 9/11.

Congressional elections next year will be a struggle, but it’s virtually impossible to see Obama being beaten in 2012, given the huge divide within the GOP (between pro-business wing and Palinite nutter-wing) and the party’s philosophical malaise.

Obama’s not as radical as many Democrats might want, but the fact he has been able to do so much, is owing to the fact he’s very much a political pragmatist.

Well, yes. That was the same sort of attitude “liberals” in the United States took. And it is exactly the type of argument that dumbed down the debate.

The GOP have made a serious strategic blunder in going for “all out” opposition to health care reform (indeed they have missed many opportunities to bring in health care reform themselves). The Republicans are going to have to live with the consequences for a very long time indeed, as the fruits of the health care reform package are seen and the scare stories turn out to be rubbish.

“the allegation that opponents of the Bill wanted “poor people to dies” was actually one levelled at me by another Liberal Democrat in this country.”
Ah. I am sure this had a pivotal impact on the debate in the USA then.

I got the 47 Million figure from here: http://freemarketcure.com/ a website that I used at the time and points out how the figure is misleading anyway. The number of people left out is not what I think actually makes it a bad bill. That’s another blog post.

But, you are right every single shred of blame lies with the GOP. Absolutely…

Seriously though, the GOP is in one of the worst cases of post-lost denial. Obama’s not going to have any serious opposition at the end of his first term if this continues.

p.s. Have you considered starting your own blog?

You assume that the fiscal stimulus has worked but you are looking at the effect over the very short term. Much of the spending going in areas where it has a multiplier of less than one, the same old fassioned pork that you inevitably get where you give the politicians a new credit card.

It is impossible to look at an economic policy over a period of less than a year. You can’t ignore the effects of the increases in debt payments, on tax and crounding out.

The monetary policy has been fighting against the effects of the deficit.

For a start neither Carter nor Clinton could to point significant progressive policy achievements at the end of the term. One year from the start of his presidency and Obama is a whisker away from delivering (nearly) universal healthcare. You suggest that the number of people left out makes it a bad bill. I’d take issue with the figures. The geeky policy blogs I spend rather too much time reading suggest that it will reduce the number of uninsured from 54 million to 23 million. That is a massive achievement. Of the remainder a big chunk will be illegal migrants, who I can see no practical way to cover in a system based on private insurance. Another chunk will be those who refuse to buy coverage and get fined for it. The money from the fines will go to providing them with some very basic emergency cover. So for them being uninsured won’t be quite as bad as it is not. So it still seems like a pretty good bill to me, good enough in fact to justify Obama’s election and belie the claim that he is an ineffective president.

The lions share of the blame for the increasingly partisan political environment must lie with the GOP. Republican senators were heavily involved with the ‘Gang of Six’ negotiations that got the bill out of committee and one many concessions in the process. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have extracted virtually every concession they wanted with the promise of the 60th vote. Yet not one GOP senator and only single congressmen voted for the bill. I am not aware of any significant Democrats accusing opponents of the bill of “wanting to kill poor people.” The allegation that they did came about because Ezra Klein, a liberal blogger, suggested out that Joe Lieberman “seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” That is both less inflamatory and more honest than talk of “death panels” by a former Republican vice-presidential candidate. I agree the debate should have been about how rather than whether to reform healthcare. The reason it wasn’t was that the GOP presented no serious alternative to current proposals, either during the past year or the eight years they controlled the white house.

Even though he has had to operate in such a hostile environment, Obama has still managed to bring about the appointment of a liberal justice to the Supreme court and the passage of a huge stimulus package. You can dispute the effectiveness of the stimulus but America has now broken out of a sharp downward spiral and is now showing signs of recovery (on Obama’s watch.) I doubt that could have been achieved without agressive use of fiscal policy, there is only so much that can be achieved by ‘pushing the string of monetary policy’, a fact which is born out by the way that countries with larger stimulus packages have tended to emerge from recession faster.

My understanding is that the drop in Obama’s approval rating is mostly the result of a sharp drop amongst Republicans and Republican leaning independents, who probably won’t going to vote for him anyway.

I agree the Democrats will probably lose ground in the mid-terms but given how large the majorities in both houses are that was always likely. They hold virtually all the democrat inclined seats already and quite a number of Republican leaning ones too. That’s a tough position to defend.

Given the horrific set of circumstances he has been dealing with Obama’s has been doing rather well.