One doesn’t need to go back very far in this blog to read how profoundly unhappy I am with Barack Obama.[1] I’ve been unhappy with his performance all along, but the truth is that he has been much, much worse than I anticipated in 2008, when even then, I decided I could not vote for him.[2] Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism, captures a significant chunk of my feeling about Obama:
This election, despite [Mitt] Romney’s shambolic Presidential campaign (his London gaffes were epic), he’s running neck and neck with Obama. The fact that he has any hope is due to Obama’s fealty to big corporate interests, particularly banks, and his neoliberal instincts. In early 2009, with the financiers cowed and desperate, and the country eager for a new direction, Obama could have take far more decisive steps to right the economy. But again and again, Obama has sold out ordinary citizens, from folding on a proposal to tax to end the preferential treatment of incomes of private equity magnates (they structure their deals to get capital gains treatment when they have no capital at risk), to pushing through a mortgage settlement that did perilous little for borrowers but served as a back door bailout to banks, or his enriching Big Pharma and the health care insurer though the ACA.[3]
- [1]David Benfell, “Entitlement and elections,” DisUnitedStates.org, July 12, 2012, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=4914; David Benfell, “Pot, Kettle, Black,” DisUnitedStates.org, July 13, 2012, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=4933; David Benfell, “Conservatives have only themselves to blame,” DisUnitedStates.org, July 18, 2012, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=4944↩
- [2]David Benfell, “No way,” DisUnitedStates.org, July 9, 2008, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=1916↩
- [3]Yves Smith, “Is Romney Going to Repeat the Palin Strategy and Choose Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi?” Naked Capitalism, July 30, 2012, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/is-romney-going-to-repeat-the-palin-strategy-and-choose-floridas-attorney-general-pam-bondi.html↩