Obama was a lawyer and the US Senator for Illinois for 7 years.
Obama as a lawyer was at best -- mediocre. It is not that hard to find his yrs as a lawyer.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/06/nation/na-obamalegal6
According to research, Obama argued
ONE case before a judge. The rest of the time, base on what he did, in that article, he was essentially a lackey for more senior and experienced attorneys.
As a state legislator, he often voted 'Present', meaning he was there but took no position.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html
In the end, Mr. Obama chose neither to vote for nor against the bill. He voted “present,” effectively sidestepping the issue, an option he invoked nearly 130 times as a state senator.
A mediocre governor would have a superior record of accomplishment than how Obama was as a state legislator and street lawyer.
He reformed ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law that increased tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. Wiki.
Yeah...And under Obama, the NSA got a lot more power than most Americans were willing to give. For every item you cite as a positive, it is not that difficult to find a negative.
Maybe by the ignorant and probably the majority of African Americans that voted. He was also elected because of his liberal stance AND people were fed up with W's incompetence and McCain's HUGE and inexplicable blunder when he decided to appoint Sarah Palin as VP.
People forget the disaster of the previous 8 years where we experienced 911 and all the following consequences under W. The Iraq war disaster and the failure of the Afghanistan goal. The economic disaster of the financial bubble collapse. All these things had a lot to do with the 2008 elections and Obama winning, not simply the color of one's skin.
No, Obama was elected
MAINLY because of the color of his skin. Even when he was on the campaign, people were warning him that on the whole, the US voting bloc is 'right of center', and his campaign messages reflected that. For example, he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. Now what does he believe ?
http://time.com/3702584/gay-marriage-axelrod-obama/
Axelrod writes that he knew Obama was in favor of same-sex marriages during the first presidential campaign, even as Obama publicly said he only supported civil unions, not full marriages. Axelrod also admits to counseling Obama to conceal that position for political reasons. "Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a 'sacred union,' " Axelrod writes.
You can look up Axelrod regarding his political affiliation. The marriage issue is just one of many 'right of center' Obama adopted during campaigning and dropped once elected.
The bottom line is that Obama was elected
NOT because he was a liberal, but because conned conservatives that he was a centrist, which confirmed what the analysts have been telling him, that Americans are neither wholly left nor right, but definitively 'right of center'.
So yes, Obama's skin color and white guilt -- more than other factors -- put him into office.
And what's wrong with that? That's what presidents are supposed to do, have the best speech writers come up with several drafts and they pick through them.
Nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is to impute those words to the man himself.
...Obama was excellent in his speaking skills off the cuff. He never struggled to find the right words and spoke in an elegant manner and complete and comprehensible sentences. Never used words like "believe me" 300 times in one speech. He was articulate, concise and always made the point with class and dignity.
Compared to W? At least this guy was likeable, somehow, despite the dumb things that came out of...or struggled to come out of his mouth loool. Some classic GWB!
Be careful on calling B43 'dumb'. To start off, the man was a military pilot. Sure, you can disparage B43's time in the Texas Air National Guard as draft dodging, but you cannot take away the hard fact that learning to fly a jet and earning your wings are not for the intellectually challenged.
I learned to fly in high school. By the time I joined the USAF, I was among the top 1/3 that already know to fly. How about you ?
But regarding B43's intelligence...
http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”
In case you are too lazy to read the entire page, Hennessey was not joking. In Hennessey's opinion, B43 was smarter than most of the students he teaches.
You have not been keeping up with current events, young man.
Today, it is an open and embarrassing secret in Washington D.C. and across the country that there is a list of people, many of them Democrats, who were intellectually trolled by B43. The guy was effing smart. And based upon his business experience before he became Texas governor and US President, he was already effing smart.
It is now admitted by many journalists that B43 trolled them by deliberately dumbing down his speech. B43 knew that in public, he will get no breaks from his critics, many of them in the media, but behind closed doors, B43 knew how smart he is and that he can hold his own to any of the experts he hired.
Just in case you are wondering about Trump, there is an excellent piece by the Atlantic magazine that surprised the analysts...
https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...ecedented-look-into-trumps-stagecraft/535794/
He is also unusually clear and complex in his discussions. Some publications, most notably STAT, have picked up on a marked decline in the president’s vocabulary and syntax over past statements. But while Trump is brash and unprepared in these calls, he is comparatively articulate—raising the possibility that he is intentionally dumbing down his speech in public, not only in rallies and speeches but also in press interviews, where he is sometimes entirely incoherent.
There is no 'possibility' about it. Trump is taking after B43 in making himself the idiot for the benefits of the media and his critics, like
YOU.
Trump and B43 are not racists but they are nationalists but B43 is more nationalistic and intellectual. B43 -- while President -- was known to read 3-4 books
A WEEK, which is how much I read a month. How many books do
YOU read a week ?
There are no guarantees on how Trump will turn out, but my advice to you is that you should cast away any notion that Trump is stupid. He is not B43, but he is shrewd and is street smart. It is too early to tell, but right now, my take is that the only person who can take on Trump is Putin. Not Xi Jinping. But Putin.
A lawyer who was Illinois' US Senator for 7 years isn't necessarily less experienced than a governor of a state, which was Reagan's, Bill Clinton and George W''s qualifications. And does being a governor of a state makes one more qualified than a US Senator? Not necessarily. A senator ends up being a lot more familiar with the ins and outs of Washington DC and lends much more credence to the position.
Of all the US Presidents, 17 were governors and 16 were Senators.
Polling consistently indicated that governors have a slight edge due to executive experience while senators get a break because of the supposedly wisdom that the office of senator alluded to.
A legislator make laws. An executive like the governor or president execute the laws. One has burdens the other do not. That is how the system works. But overall, B43's experience as a businessman and governor, both executive positions, gave him a more credible image than Obama did. You forget that Obama did not run against B43, who served two terms and beaten Democratic challenger John Kerry, but against a slew of
WHITE Republican candidates.
Again...Obama won by the color of his skin.
