Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy

[annominous]

142. To be fair, Obama faced a different situation than Reagan did

It's important to remember what Reagan did to retirement plans in the 1980s -- he persuaded everyone to participate in IRAs, and get invested in Wall Street. That made everyones' pockets easier to pick when the time came, but no one thinks that way while they are getting ahold of their employer match.

Had Obama not saved the banks and Wall Street, many more Americans' savings and retirement plans would have gone down in flames. FDR had a banking failure to deal with, but not one that so many ordinary people had so much investment in. FDR did not have to deal with too big to fail. Obama did, and he did not deal with it, and now too big to fail is even too bigger to fail than before. So I agree he's been ineffective, but that's because Wall Street outplayed him at eleventy-dimensional chess. They've been setting up this gambit since Reagan's administration, it's done they won. Now the big banks are trying to get tax breaks for credit unions repealed, that's another front in the banksters war against us.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/06/business/la-fi-credit-union-taxes-20130706

It's also important to remember, as the author of the salon article does not, that liberals didn't have any option but Obama in 2008 and 2012, once the 2008 primary was resolved. In our primary system, for the election for POTUS, only a few voters in a few states get to decide who the nominees will be. I think it's BS, but the states with the power do not care about my opinion, they just want the power and prestige of being the deciders, so it's also a done deal unless the rest of us demand a national primary date. We could have primaried Obama, I suppose, but in the runup to 2012 that was not a serious option, according to the wise ones. The selection of Obama was also a done deal. We need to figure why, and avoid knee-jerk presidential-candidate selections, if we can, in the future.

Anyway, by Nov of 2008 or of 2012, what were my options, Palin/McCain? Rmoney? Never gonna happen.

All that said, I'm very disappointed with POTUS Obama's management of the banking meltdown that fried the world, his use of drones, his use of memos to justify killing American citizens abroad ... and his timidity in tackling the RWNJs .