I think you have him confused with George W. Bush.
Yes, Bush was far worse on that front. The Iraq War will go down as one of the biggest blunders of all time. Even worse than spending trillions of dollars on a lie are the thousands of lives that were lost over it.
angela channing said:
Obama has done a lot to repair how the USA is viewed internationally following the Presidency of George W Bush and his war in Iraq which resulted in America being viewed negatively by many countries. Whatever Obama's shortcomings have been on domestic policy he was done an enormous amount to improve the USA's international reputation.
Except that he didn't withdraw troops from Iraq when he said he would, he didn't close Gitmo, and he started his own wars in Libya and Syria. He ran on a campaign of transparency, and vowed to end the unconstitutional NSA surveillance program. But thanks to Edward Snowden, we learned that Obama had actually doubled down on Bush's surveillance program. When caught, he reversed the position he held during the campaign and said you can't have 100% privacy and 100% security. Unlike Bush, Obama is intelligent and well spoken. Unfortunately, he had no problem abandoning his principles in favor of neocon policies at home and abroad.
To his credit, he was able to have Bin Laden captured and killed without getting us into war to do so. However, the rest of his foreign policy is quite hawkish.
That said, the economy has improved under Obama. He's managed to maintain a low inflation rate, cut the federal deficit by two-thirds, and reduced the unemployment rate. On the downside, the growth rate of the GDP has been low and the national debt has increased. Still, the economy has done better under Obama than Bush. Conservatives hate Jimmy Carter, but even his economic record is slightly better than Bush's.
Obama is most known for the Affordable Care Act, but there have been issues there as well. He went from supporting single payer healthcare to a mandate to buy health insurance. While the number of uninsured Americans has dropped, millions still remain without coverage. In states that refused to expand Medicaid, people in poverty often don't meet the Medicaid eligibility requirements. On the flip side, they're also unable to afford health insurance. Having single payer healthcare at the federal level would solve that issue. This is why I liked the Sanders plan, rather than Hillary Clinton's proposed tweaks to the current plan.
McGarrett said:
We can dialogue if you want..
Let me ask what has he done for black people who were the group that was motivated to come out in droves to vote for him??
That's difficult for me to answer. I'm not a member of the black community, and I tend to think more in terms of what a president does to help the poor and middle class.
That said, he has pushed for criminal justice reform to reduce sentences for non-violent crimes, and supports rehabilitation of drug offenders. Minorities in general make up over half of prison populations because they are more likely to be stopped, searched, and often receive tougher sentences than whites.
