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Andrew Sullivan attempts to mount a defense of President Obama’s record from the standpoint of achieving liberal objectives. But on some key items, he gets the President’s record and positions wrong, even backwards.
Sullivan starts by declaring that Obama’s critics from both the left and right are unhinged from reality. He then goes on to give Obama credit for things he had nothing to do with or even things that happened in spite of Obama’s opposition. From Sullivan:
They miss, it seems to me, two vital things. The first is the simple scale of what has been accomplished on issues liberals say they care about. A depression was averted. The bail-out of the auto industry was—amazingly—successful. Even the bank bailouts have been repaid to a great extent by a recovering banking sector. The Iraq War—the issue that made Obama the nominee—has been ended on time and, vitally, with no troops left behind. Defense is being cut steadily, even as Obama has moved his own party away from a Pelosi-style reflexive defense of all federal entitlements. Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life. Gays now openly serve in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act is dying in the courts, undefended by the Obama Justice Department. Vast government money has been poured into noncarbon energy investments, via the stimulus. Fuel-emission standards have been drastically increased. Torture was ended. Two moderately liberal women replaced men on the Supreme Court. Oh, yes, and the liberal holy grail that eluded Johnson and Carter and Clinton, nearly universal health care, has been set into law. Politifact recently noted that of 508 specific promises, a third had been fulfilled and only two have not had some action taken on them. To have done all this while simultaneously battling an economic hurricane makes Obama about as honest a follow-through artist as anyone can expect from a politician.
I apparently totally missed the moment when Obama convinced the American people to support gay marriage and marijuana legalization.
The record is that Obama has repeatedly stated he opposes marijuana legalization and marriage equality. Logically Obama deserves no more credit for these trends, which seem driven by demographic changes, than George W. Bush does. After all, support for both issues repeatedly hit new record highs under Bush.
Public support for both issues continued to hit new records under Obama, simply because polls found new record levels of support basically every year for the last decade. There is every reason to believe these long term trends would have continued regardless who was elected in 2008.
Obama has not helped these trends. If anything Obama has set back marijuana legalization. Experts in the drug reform field have determined Obama has been worse than Bush on the issue of medical marijuana.
Similarly, a president almost never deserves the credit or the blame for a law passed at the state level, unless the Administration was heavily involved in lobbying for its passage. Obama no more deserves credit for New York’s marriage equality law passed “under Obama” than Bush deserves credit for Rhodes Island adopting medical marijuana legalization “under Bush.” I would also never blame Obama for Florida’s law requiring drug testing of welfare recipients, a law also passed “under Obama.”
Sullivan concludes by saying “If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin.” But in these instances, the spin is claiming Obama should get credit for things that are happening in spite of Obama.
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He lives in his own little world, that one.
Obama’s positions are everything a Democratic candidate would be successful running against.
This is all like a bad acid trip.
Let me get this straight. Andrew Sullivan becomes infatuated with a masculine politician (phrased that way to include Margaret Thatcher); becomes disenchanted; and then, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, becomes infatuated again. No.One.Could.Have.Predicted.
Even by the standards of Tina Brown’s Daily Yeast, Sullivan is an embarrassment.
He’s spinning the facts in this biased article.
He’s right, Obama ended the war in Iraq. He’s replaced our troops with private contractors in the tens of thousands. He ended torture, too. Unless you count what was done to Bradley Manning, what is routinely done to people at GitMo (which Obama promised to close, then backed out on…), and what we routinely do overseas that isn’t being reported. One could argue that in most cases Obama has just replaced torture with assassination.
He did pass ‘nearly’ (cute, Andrew) universal health care. The only mechanism for coverage is legally mandating people to carry coverage. That’s like saying (hypothetically) that Obama passed legalized prostitution by legally mandating everyone to pay for sex.
I’ll give him DADT, although I could heavily criticize how long it took and how it was done.
The liberal women on the SCOTUS are fucking worthless and simply mesh into the cog that raped this country repeatedly under the Bush administration.
IIRC, the DoJ has repeatedly argued for DOMA in the courts, defending that case vigorously on multiple occasions (I’m too lazy to google the instances/cases).
So, Andrew, thanks for carrying water. Too bad there are so many fucking holes in your bucket.
The scary thing is Andrew Sullivan while I disagree with him on everything Jon has pointed out and other things I still think is the sanest GOPer out there and the smartest GOPer out there since Christopher Hitchens got drunk after 9/11 went conservative and stayed drunk until he died.
Its tough to have a conversation with the other side when Andrew represents the GOP minority view and he is still so removed from reality.
Andrew represents a GOP attempt to compromise with the left and before 9/11 it worked. Now the country is taking sides we want jobs while a minority want to cut SS and Medicare but that minority is the Media and Ruling 1%.
Nobody is paying attention to Andrew, Joe Klein etc anymore.
Give Sullivan a couple years. Then he can renounce Obama just like he’s renounced Bush. Remember when he called people (like Obama) who opposed the Iraq War traitors and Bush the best president ever? Neither does he.
NO wonder…hard to remember much when you’re psychotic…;(
‘ still so removed from reality ‘
Hits the nail on the head. Sullivan thinks he’s speaking to a GOP audience. Out here in the real world, we know our facts from his fiction.
Sullivan is an idiot. He’s always been an idiot. Not to mention a conservative. In that context at least I can see why he likes Obama.
The Obama campaign has already become more offensive than the 2000 Gore campaign. At least Gore waited until after the Democratic convention to unleashed the plague of hacks who wagged their fingers at progressives and told them, “but you have to vote for our candidate because the alternative is a Republican.”
I voted for Obama in 2008, learned (the hard way) from my mistake, and do not intend to repeat it this November.
Not mentioned was not prosecuting the Bush war criminals or the bank criminals. As far as I’m concerned, nothing else matters. Without rule of law, you don’t have a civilization.
Barry’s a Corporatist and only a Dem. Corporatist because the “other” wing of the his party hates anyone of “color.”
You don’t? You must hate us for our freedoms. Laws? We don’t need stinkin laws!
And with DADT, bo vigorously enforced it right to the end. It was Liebermann strangely enough that should be credited more so for it’s end.
Heck, even the women on the supreme court are more moderate than liberal by true definition. In fact one of ‘em (if I reacll it’s Kagan) is corporate friendly.
I see no reason whatsoever to support this con man.
Yes, Sullivan is in a fantasy world. I quit reading him because he seems to not want readers to be able to comment on his musings.
Maybe the most ridiculous claim he makes is that Obama has achieved nearly universal healthcare. Er, no. Tens of millions are uninsured, millions more underinsured, and millions cannot afford to take their meds on schedule and at recommended dosage. Obamacare has done nothing to change the fact that the US pays 2-3 times as much per person on healthcare as the rest of the advanced world. Obama let Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance control his agenda from Day 1. Just as he let Wall St, particularly Goldman Sachs, control his economic agenda from Day 1.
And defense is not being “cut”. There is maybe going to be some slight cuts to the Pentagon’s Wish List for the next decade, but defense spending will rise steadily.
Thanks. It’s actually pretty simple.
Christopher Hitchens was a far better writer than Andrew Sullivan will likely ever be, regardless of your position on the politics. I disagreed with Hitchens on a variety of topics, but always appreciated his wry wit.
As to Sullivan: I can’t see who he thinks this will covince of anything. Are there actually people who forget about single- payer?
Sullivan has responded to this post here. It wasn’t much of a response.
He didn’t even address the point that the increases in public support for gay marriage and legal marijuana seem to be steady regardless of who the president is.
Then he goes on to say that Obama’s record on the issues is so great because he’s not doing anything about them. (“…it’s more durable because Obama didn’t do it. We did.”)
He claims that Obama “gently pushed [the issues] along”. How? He doesn’t say. Just some of Obama’s magic ‘leading from behind’, which apparently means that no matter what good things may happen, they happen because of Obama’s greatness.
I still check out Sullivan’s blog because of the nice aggregation of interesting stuff from around the web. His own personal thoughts on subjects are quite often inane, as he showed here.