What he did on race relations is that he had the audacity of hope 'being a negro who refuses to know his place'. This alone was provocation enough for certain people.

I've got a ton of criticism of Obama and his presidency, but they way he handled race relations is not one of them.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 24 2020 05:42pm

We're pretty much in agreement. There was basically nothing Obama could have done to make race relations better. Look at the early Tea Party shit before they got astroturfed. The grass-roots opposition to Obama was racist as fuuuuck. On one hand it got milder when the Kochs started bankrolling it, but part of me wishes they hadn't and we had seen the real tea party for longer. Maybe then people would stop saying racism isn't a problem anymore.

I didnt pay close enough attention to US politics between 2008 and 2012, but yeah, the Tea Party was a reaction and opposition to the change the country was undergoing, the change which was symbolized and brought to light by Obama. I do believe that the Tea Party was also about things like big vs small government, but it's obvious that race played a huge role in this movement.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 24 2020 05:50pm

Everyone was saying at the time " Black president? Sure to be assassinated "

but that never happened. Instead, public discourse was murdered.

He mishandled Ferguson and the Trayvon Martin case. Those two cases are the precursors to the George Floyd saga and the mass hysteria the country is currently enduring.

On other matters he did quite well. I think he handled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy about as well as could be expected.

we got free universal health care out of it with the affordable healthcare act though! *LAUGH OUT LOUD*

I don't know a whole ton about this topic -- so correct me if I'm wrong / off base

it seemed to be more successful in states that had Dem governors, and failed miserably in states that had Rep governors

what does "weathering the financial crisis" mean to you
one of Trump's legitimate criticisms of the Obama administration was that it mishandled the crisis and had the slowest recovery ever, propped up by artificial banking rather than real economic growth
likewise, the ACA was not exactly a big win. It shifted the burden and skyrocketed the price of healthcare for the middle class once it stabilized- beyond just the chaos and utter failure of the rollout as insurers were driven out of markets
Obama's foreign policy was an unmitigated disaster, but his domestic policy was 2 steps forward 1 step back

I don't think "he didn't do much" should be mistaken as "he couldn't do much"
Obama always had the power to speak out in an attempt to bridge the divide and give something to the other side. In all the partisan culture wars he could have asked his own side to back down. Tell people that maybe Trayvon wasn't innocent, that maybe Michael Brown did something wrong, tell people that Trump is their president and they should work with him instead of against him. There would be a political cost each step of the way, it would harm his own legacy, it would hurt his own team. Its why people don't do it, partisanship is sustained by self-interest.

I've said for a long time that if Obama was a true believer in his message of uniting America, he had the perfect opportunity in his lame duck days after Trump's election during the transition. He could have hosted a televised fireside chat and told the people in the streets breaking windows and burning trashcans that it was his legacy they were burning and that the Russia story was a bunch of nonsense and the country should come together for civil disagreement without impugning motives, blah blah blah, you get the picture. If he was clever he could figure out the right messaging, whatever form of conciliation in defeat. Instead he used his last months in office to pass a bunch of spite EOs that would trip up Trump's transition over issues too toxic for him to do while he or Hillary were in office, passed measures he knew would have no effect at all but to give Trump a black eye like the PP mandate, overturn decades of foreign policy to gimp our international relations like with Israel and the UN, gave his intel officials the explicit permissions to go ahead with their Russiaburger hit on Flynn and pursue Trump, and then Obama rounded it all off by eating $30 worth of Taco Bell and taking a massive shit inside the oval office bathroom toilet and not flushing

Fortunately, hell is full of forgiveness.