Posted on 12/30/2011 1:25:43 PM PST by thecodont
[...]
And yet, here we are at the end of 2011, with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and discussion boards still teeming with intemperate quick takes. President Obama has taken considerable heat this year, but isn't it too soon to accuse him of being an ineffectual leader? Isn't that one lesson from the Tucson incident?
On a Christmas Day episode of "GPS" on CNN, Fareed Zakaria interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, who reminded us that it's too early to cast Obama's legacy in stone. Here's an excerpt from their interview:
I admire him very much, and I think that his -- his time in office presented him with problems such as very few presidents have ever had to address. And given the complexity and the gravity of those problems, I think he's handled himself very well. My -- my hat goes off to him, my heart goes out to him. [ ]
All of our -- all of our best presidents, without exception, have had a sense of history, and I don't think that's coincidental. And one of the things that a sense of history gives to a person is not just an appreciation, an understanding of what happened before we came along, but the realization that we, too, are a part of history and we, too, are going to be judged by history. [ ]
And that's extremely important. Today's polls, today's -- tomorrow's headlines, are not going to matter.
Zakaria agreed: "[W]e cannot really tell the quality of a leader judged from the noise of the present. We need time and perspective."
(Excerpt) Read more at opinion.latimes.com ...
No.
Yeah, sure... why not give him 20 years?
People are such meanies.
No, I don’t think it’s too early to judge his presidency for what it is.
If it turns out that any of his legislation turn out well, I’ll give credit where credit is due.
Is it too soon for the rookie Hussein to be vetted?
ALL of the rules have to be changed to defend the ineffectual and corrupt wannabe dictator.
I am shocked by this rudeness. How judgmental of you bigoted, inbred, hypocritical, violent, Sarah Palin-loving, Fox News-watching, Rush Limbaugh-hearing, Bible-thumping, tea-bagging, beer-swilling, moonshining, gun-slinging, truck-driving, non-recycling, high school dropouting people.
Did I leave a stereotype of conservatives out?
Well everything up until now has been either Bush’s fault or the fault of the Republican Congress. It probably is too early. /s
And we haven’t even gone through his “it’s the media’s fault” phase yet.
These people are the biggest bunch of intellectual douche bags the world has ever seen.
Oh if only we could see him in the fullness of time... blah blah blah...
Yeah, like the Civil War, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the British attack on Washington, slavery, - Obama has it so much tougher.
And I used to respect David McCulloch as a historian. Maybe he's hanging around Michael Beschloss, who rated Obama as the most brilliant president ever, with an IQ off the charts (no doubt gleaned from Obama's school records).
Regards,
The judgement on him has been made a long time ago. Guilty as charged.
They judged him worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize about an hour and a half after took office so three years in makes it easy to judge his presidency an abject failure easily positioning him way to the rear of Jimmy Carter as, not only the worst president but very possibly the worst person ever to hold national office.
Touche!
LOL!
“...his time in office presented him with problems such as very few presidents have ever had to address.”
Oh, I am so sick of hearing that talking point. We don’t live in a perfect world, and every President inherits problems from previous administrations. Some have more than others, true. Bill Clinton inherited a lot fewer domestic problems than Reagan did, for example. But what matters is how a President *deals* with them. And on that count, Obama most certainly *can* be judged. And I think most people would agree it’s not the “B+” grade he gave himself earlier in the term.
POTD. Well done.
He is in the Top 5 as the best of all time ............just ask him
Freeping.....?
And I thought Carter was bad...........
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