2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Before I die, I'd like to feel admiration for a living President [View all]Retrograde
(10,176 posts)He started out well, winning election in a landslide and pushing his Civil Rights platform, but not many people felt a lot of admiration for him in 1967 or 1968: "Hey, Hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?" was a common chant at anti-war protests. We hear a lot about the good things FDR did, but popular histories tend to gloss over the not so admirable parts - internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry in some parts of the country, refusal to desegregate the military, attempts to pack the Supreme Court.
Presidents, like most people, aren't perfect. Clinton was the voice of a new generation when he was elected back in 1992: he did some things well, others not so well. And it's the same with just about everyone who held the office. I find Obama - despite many shortcomings and areas where I disagree with him - to be one of the more admirable presidents of my lifetime in terms of his consistency and apparent faithfulness to his oaths.