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Obama to Diane Sawyer - "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," he told ABC's "World News" anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today.
I'm beginning to realize Obama may only be a one-term president, and a mediocre one at that. IMO the only thing he will be remembered for is being the first black president.
President Obama has always been O.K. with being a one term President , and history is going to JUDGE Him Very Kindly especially after some of these r****** are no longer alive.
And if by change Oopsssss I meant Chance that he is a two term PRESIDENT that will just be more icing on the cake!!!!!
When Barack Obama began campaigning, he was carrying the same old Democratic Banner that has been carried for years and years. It wasn't until AFTER the recession became full blown that those policies became more attractive to espouse. The "never waste a good crisis" mantra was the perfect opportunity for Democrats to finally pull off this anti-Wall Street agenda.
This begs the question though - why was there a crisis in the first place? Don't give me the usual "Fannie/Freddie/Dems took Congress in '06" line. Let's cut past the usual partisan talking points. This house of cards started getting built well before then, and it wasn't just people who qualified for Fannie/Freddie loans who bit off more than they could chew during the boom. There were middle class people buying mansions because the credit was easy. Hell, I could've bought a house I couldn't afford when I was 21 making a hair or two above minimum wage. "YOUR JOB IS YOUR CREDIT! BUY CHEAPER THAN YOU CAN RENT!" Remember, a big thing of Bush's was "the ownership society." Everyone needed to own what they lived in. I didn't buy into it. I'm glad I didn't. I wonder what these people think knowing they were part of a global economic collapse. I really do hope they sleep well at night. And then they wanted bailed out. People who voted "red" and "blue" (God I hate those descriptors) alike. Anyone will ask for a handout and take it if they deem they need it enough.
More than any president or legislator of either party, if I had a gun to my head demanding I pin the blame on any one person for the state of the economy today it'd be Alan Greenspan. He allowed that easy credit to flow for too long after some short-term setbacks in the market like Enron and then dot-com bust. But you know, I suppose the Bush administration really needed those polls up leading into '04, especially once people started getting war-weary. And now we have more Ben Bernanke to look forward to, it appears.
Bill Clinton signed a garbage bill called Gramm-Leach-Bliley that basically allowed risky loans to get chopped up like sausage and spread out throughout the financial markets, turning into toxic assets that led to the Wall Street bailout. None of this had to happen, but you know what they say, any kind of deregulation is good. Or not?
Basically, this is a bipartisan doo-doo sandwich and we're all either going to retch or acquire a taste for it because it's all ours and it's gotta go somewhere. And of course we can't bail out the too-big-to-fail banks without the honchos who oversaw their firms' careening into the abyss their fat bonuses. Main Street my ass. Made a hell of a campaign cliche though, whether you were in the McCain camp or the Obama camp.
As you can see, I'm just slightly cynical of politics in general.
Oh, and just to rub the salt on your wound, when Bush was in office, I had a mid 7 figure portfolio, which sank to the low 7 figures as Bush left. Ever since Obama took office, it is approaching the 8 figure mark. And I'm not giving you a dime of it. God, Obama is good.
You must be a financial wiz. Everyone I know who had big portfolios lost a heck of a lot more than a few hundred thousand. More like a million +++.
Unless you think a 7 figure number is 99,999.99 as opposed to 9,999,999.99?
Agreed. If Republicans had a decent, fiscal conservative, social moderate/liberal, Obama would be history in 2012. However the God card isn't going to work in 2012 and thats the only card Republicans seem to know how to play these days. Never before in this history of this country have we been more in need of a new political party.
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Obama will win a second term because though the country will not like it, they will vote for him before they vote for Palin or Huckabee.
NO second term exists for this One.
NO Democrat-control of the House and Senate.....much longer.
NO hope for the change you really believed in.
I remember not very long ago it was considered unpatriotic to even criticize the president's policies let alone call him a scumbag. Even for the so-called liberal media. What happened? Or does that only count when "our guy" is in charge?
The lib/dems did such a good job of taking nasty and uncalled for swipes at Bush and his family it opened everyone's eyes as to how to play dirty, no one is above it anymore. If his girls were "of age", I'm sure they'd be getting trashed just like Bush's daughters were. Oh, wait...Sarah Palin's under-aged daughter got a lot of crap too, without a thought. Nice!
So get over it.
If Obama weren't somewhat black, he'd be thrown under the bus a lot harder and more frequently. Someone might even wonder how a man who travels as extensively as he has doesn't have a copy of his birth certificate on hand or at least in his personal files. Real easy to scan in. It's not like he's 100 years old....
But, criticize Obama, and the race card always gets played...
The lib/dems did such a good job of taking nasty and uncalled for swipes at Bush and his family it opened everyone's eyes as to how to play dirty, no one is above it anymore. If his girls were "of age", I'm sure they'd be getting trashed just like Bush's daughters were. Oh, wait...Sarah Palin's under-aged daughter got a lot of crap too, without a thought. Nice!
I'm talking about a fargone time before anyone outside of Wasilla even heard of Sarah Palin, but thanks for the lecture all the same. I do think politicians' kids should be left out of it, whether it's Bristol Palin or Chelsea Clinton. Although all that "abstinence-only education family values etc. etc." talk does kind of fall flat when....you know what, forget it.
Be sure to save a piece of your mind for those lefty libs you so despise, because I don't think I'm one of them. I'd hate to eat it all up and leave none for them.
This begs the question though - why was there a crisis in the first place? Don't give me the usual "Fannie/Freddie/Dems took Congress in '06" line. Let's cut past the usual partisan talking points. This house of cards started getting built well before then, and it wasn't just people who qualified for Fannie/Freddie loans who bit off more than they could chew during the boom. There were middle class people buying mansions because the credit was easy. Hell, I could've bought a house I couldn't afford when I was 21 making a hair or two above minimum wage. "YOUR JOB IS YOUR CREDIT! BUY CHEAPER THAN YOU CAN RENT!" Remember, a big thing of Bush's was "the ownership society." Everyone needed to own what they lived in. I didn't buy into it. I'm glad I didn't. I wonder what these people think knowing they were part of a global economic collapse. I really do hope they sleep well at night. And then they wanted bailed out. People who voted "red" and "blue" (God I hate those descriptors) alike. Anyone will ask for a handout and take it if they deem they need it enough.
You need to go back to the Jimmy Carter days. And then you need to go back to Obama's ACORN days and what he championed.
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More than any president or legislator of either party, if I had a gun to my head demanding I pin the blame on any one person for the state of the economy today it'd be Alan Greenspan. He allowed that easy credit to flow for too long after some short-term setbacks in the market like Enron and then dot-com bust. But you know, I suppose the Bush administration really needed those polls up leading into '04, especially once people started getting war-weary. And now we have more Ben Bernanke to look forward to, it appears.
Alan Greenspan had nothing to do with it. Interest rates mean nothing if you get a 0% down loan and a 0% interest rate if you can't afford the monthly payments from the get-go.
I don't know why banks gave out so many risky loans. Other than the "every American should own a home" no matter what (thanks Jimmy Carter) and ACORN (Obama in a training mode) threatening banks if they didn't fulfill a "risky loan" quota to those who couldn't pay their rent, let alone a mortgage no MATTER the interest rate.
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As you can see, I'm just slightly cynical of politics in general.
I'm talking about a fargone time before anyone outside of Wasilla even heard of Sarah Palin, but thanks for the lecture all the same. I do think politicians' kids should be left out of it, whether it's Bristol Palin or Chelsea Clinton. Although all that "abstinence-only education family values etc. etc." talk does kind of fall flat when....you know what, forget it.
Be sure to save a piece of your mind for those lefty libs you so despise, because I don't think I'm one of them. I'd hate to eat it all up and leave none for them.
Grasshopper, there was no lecture.
I don't really listen to anyone's idea of how to teach their kids birth control. All I know is that if one of my 3 sons knock some chick up, I didn't do my job. And neither did that chick's parents. I personally believe that abstinence is a good way to avoid a lot of potential problems, but being informed and armed (while pretending to practice abstinence) is much better and more realistic.
I'd rather NOT learn from my mistakes when it comes to the topic of birth control and my children.
You need to go back to the Jimmy Carter days. And then you need to go back to Obama's ACORN days and what he championed.
So what you're trying to tell me is in 12 years of Reagan/Bush with the GOP controlling the Senate for half that time, then six years of Clinton with the GOP controlling Congress which managed to get Gramm-Leach-Bliley to Bill's desk to sign, then a Republican trifecta for the first six years of W. and we're STILL going back 30 years to Carter? Let's blame LBJ and FDR while we're at it. You know what? Abraham Lincoln's to blame. Had he not freed the slaves we wouldn't have needed to expand the American Dream to minorities. They had their place already before he went with his bad emancipating self. Or why stop there? Let's blame the Founding Fathers. If they'd have stayed in England none of this would've happened, right? Seriously, this is a little like claiming to have lost a football game because the other team scored on the opening kickoff.
The peanut farmer from Georgia blew chunks as a president, but you know what? Herbert Hoover blew just as hard and we rebounded within 30 years from that too, war and all. And it's not like between the Carter era and today was all peacetime. So this idea that ol' Jimmy is the cause of all our problems is about the most ridiculous thing anyone could come up with. If that was the case, the "Reagan Revolution" must've amounted to a whole lot of nothing. After all, had he really defeated communism we wouldn't be sounding the Red Scare alarm today with Obama, now would we?
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Alan Greenspan had nothing to do with it. Interest rates mean nothing if you get a 0% down loan and a 0% interest rate if you can't afford the monthly payments from the get-go.
No, it just invited people to take on more house than they needed and/or could afford, which for some people was any house at all. Renting was second-class under any circumstances. You had to own to amount to anything. Yes, this was the ideal, which I'll expound upon in a bit. Why was I throwing my money away to the landlord when I could own the roof that keeps my head dry, I was asked.
Well, I'll tell you why - because although I was young and dumb, I didn't totally fall off the turnip wagon the week before. And I knew what the "A" in "ARM" stood for. So whatever the rates were in 2002 didn't mean a dilly damn thing once they readjusted, say, oh, 2006. About the time housing started going bust. Coincidence? If only.
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I don't know why banks gave out so many risky loans. Other than the "every American should own a home" no matter what (thanks Jimmy Carter) and ACORN (Obama in a training mode) threatening banks if they didn't fulfill a "risky loan" quota to those who couldn't pay their rent, let alone a mortgage no MATTER the interest rate.
It was the banks, but it was also the fly-by night mortgage lenders (e.g. Nationwide) who were able to take their cuts from each sale during the boom, put all the risk off on somebody else (thanks to that bill of Phil Gramm's that Clinton signed) and make off like a bandit before the dookie hit the fan.
So, let's hear from a former president on the "ownership society" shall we? But guess what? It's not Carter.
No spin here unless it's Bush's own. Straight from the White House, from 2004.
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"...if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country."
-President George W. Bush, June 17, 2004
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Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America's vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America's Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago. President Bush's initiative to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes...(read link for more)
There it is. Now, to his credit, he did talk around '04 about reining in Freddie and Fannie. But, even though he had the manpower in Congress to ram it through, maybe throwing in a few pork-flavored bones in a bill to get a Democrat or three to hop on board - not that W. was adverse to spending the taxpayer dime by any stretch. And in the end, nothing got done. Not that it mattered by '04, because this row of dominoes was most of the way laid out by then. So then, we get to play Monday morning quarterback. We can always jump to the partisan knuckledragging and blame Dodd or Pelosi or whoever from the party hiking about the political wilderness at the time, but truth be known, reforming Freddie and Fannie would've undermined Bush's own agenda. Sure, he talked. He warned. Talking and warning does a whole lot of nothing without action. We got warned about al-Qaeda too.
And just like that, we got hit.
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You have to be. All politicians stink.
Now you're talking. But you still seem to think one gang of thieves is any better than the other. Why is that? The GOP and the Dems are all the same when it's all over with.
Let's give anarchy a try. It'll lead to government all over again, but there's always that chance we'll get it right next time.
Obama to Diane Sawyer - "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," he told ABC's "World News" anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today.
Not sure why this is news. He did indicate this was a one shot deal on his campaign trail.
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