President Obama's credibility: salvageable or gone for good?

Salvageable for those who support him. Never was there for a significant part of the population.

Remember that the right wing of the country was contemptuous of the President before the end of February 2009. Rick Santorelli’s rant, which is credited for starting the Tea Party, was on February 19, 2009!

Similar to what Zen said, most Republicans have probably hated him all along, and in that sense their opinion of him hasn’t changed.

Salvageable for those who voted for him.

Unattainable for those who didn’t.

Ditto to the answers above. When the man reeked of credibility (Ben Laden) it made not a bit of difference. The right wing reaction to the black man in the white house was without a shred of rationality from the outset. The ACA flub is a virtual gift.

I think he should stop apologizing for what are completely predictable glitches in the ACA rollout process. This has all happened before.

@stanleybmanly Exactly right. When bin Laden was killed, the right gave the credit to GW Bush, which was crazy, since Bush had given up on getting OBL while he was in office. The Right just said that Obama couldn’t stop it.

@filmfann It really is fantastic that a healthcare plan devised and written by insurance companies, then hard pimped by the Heritage Foundation is now satanic due to the mere endorsement of the President.

Just a note here; a bit of history:

In 2013, a study published in the journal Tobacco Control concluded that organizations within the Tea Party movement were connected with non-profit organizations that the tobacco industry and other corporate interests worked with and provided funding for, including activist right wing organizations founded by the Koch brothers.

Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms-tea-party-_b_2663125.html

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/11/documents-reveal-tobacco-companies-funded-their-own-tea-party-first/

Dr. Paul Krugman wrote that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grassroots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey.

Tea Party members often think they are a grassroots movement, but with the power of the Tea Party comes from their sources of news and information which is sourced from the connections between “market fundamentalists”, the tobacco industrym and the Tea Party philosophy can be traced to a 1971 memo from tobacco lawyer Lewis F. Powell, Jr. who advocated more political power for corporations at the expense of the public.

Now to address the question itself.

These people are not going to change their minds about the President as long as people like the Koch Brothers and corporate funding continues to work to maintain the organization and preach it’s fundamentalist capitalist theocracy.

So nothing at all with change.

Those who were never believed or were effected by the motivations that formed the Tea Party are still not going to suddenly agree with their messages.

Those who chose to vote for the president and thought his agenda was good for the US are going to continue to support his efforts.

Personally, this voter has remained as knowledgeable as I can possibly be, and I believe the President has been blocked at every turn from doing his job as he was elected to do by a majority of Americans.

Well, I tell you, I’m a Dem who voted for him twice but have lost much confidence in his ability to manage his job. I’d be interested to know what other Dems think. I already know how non-Dems feel.

I’m pretty darn upset with him by now. He had to get this right and he screwed it up. Now, I think we’ve lost the chance for health care reform.

I saw a clip of President Clinton explaining why people would have to give up their insurance policies under the health reform plan he was promoting in the nineties. It was awkward and lengthy, and probably contributed to his failure to get anything passed. I can see why Obama didn’t want to go that route. I have no idea what Obama was thinking, or hoping, when he emphasized the opposite position. Perhaps if the rollout had gone as originally planned, it wouldn’t have been an issue.

I don’t agree with everything President Obama has done or said, but I don’t always agree 100% of the time with the man in the mirror either. To my way of thinking, he gets more things right than wrong, and I continue to be grateful that he is my president rather than either of the two opponents he beat.

I think he has lost much of his credibility. He had the right ideas but failed to implement them. The failure is bigger than Obama’s credibility, the American system of democratic government is failing.

If the Insurance Companies would accept the fact they can’t drop people for existing conditions or decide when someone develops cancer that they didn’t fill out the application correctly when they held back that they had acne as a teenager, then keeping your old policy would be fine.

But it’s the Insurance companies that are determined to maximize profits at the expense of the needs of all Americans and I think he’s right to put the people first. No matter what, even if it costs a few pennies more, to be free of the tyranny of health insurance profit margins is a real plus – a real major benefit.

In my opinion, he is just as credible today as he was from the very beginning…virtually non existent.

As a right-leaner I was hopeful for his potential (did not vote for him though) but he lost credibility pretty quickly with me when it was clear that it was business as usual + a bunch fuel to throw on the fire.

Gitmo’s still open, voted fot tax cuts & patriot act, now obamacare issues. If I were a Dem I’d be maad.

Hopefully gone for good. The United States is in dire need of new leadership and soon. That includes a new president AND a lot of new Congressmen and Congresswomen.

Liberals have legitimate reasons for feeling disappointed. However, the assault on the man from the right has been so beyond the pale, that a rational discussion of his shortcomings is difficult.

Obama is a politician. Are you implying that politicians have credibility to begin with?

At times, he’s folded like a lawnchair. He’s made promises he can’t keep, especially not against the obstructionists in Congress (where the real power is). And yet, despite all that, his credibility is about average. Does he really lie to us more than the Bushes, Clinton, or any other president did? I think not. The only real difference is that previous presidents have been Caucasians born to US citizens whereas Obama’s a non-White whose father was not a US citizen.

@Bluefreedom Yes; the Tea Party extremist branch of the Republican party must be purged from power so that we can get back to having sane, rational debate over what is best for our nation instead of repeatedly being held hostage by domestic terrorists who would rather burn this country to the ground thatn not let it be run their way.

At this point Obama doesn’t care about or need credibility. Obamacare is an oxymoron. The ACA is not about healthcare, it is about growing government until it crushes capitalism. It is about power and control. Credibility? Please. Don’t you know that politicians are not to be trusted?

@gondwanalon You mean Romneycare Plus, right? I mean, it’s just a federal version of what Massachusetts got under Mitt. Since it was put in place by Republicans, I would think that the Right would love the ACA. Or was it merely that it was a good idea until Democrats agreed that it was a good idea, then it became Evil Incarnate?

No, this isn’t about growing government.
It’s about pure partisanship and the Catch-22 that it puts you in.

If you take a hardline stance, you become like the Tea Party; extremist, nihilist, zealots incapable of logic, and utterly divorced from reality or humanity. If you don’t you lose the support of your base and become unelectable.

So, what will it be? There will always be a bunch of people who will hate everything you do, but would you rather alienate the Moderate Middle, or lose your base? There are not enough votes in the Left, Middle, or Right to win an election, so you have to have the support of a large number of people in at least 2 of those groups.

Obama went the latter route for a bit, lost the base, went back to “line in the sand”, and lost both the Left and the Middle by flip-flopping. At least G.W. Bush held the line, right or wrong. Say what you will, but at least he was smart enough to stick with his base, and be consistent enough that he had some degree of trustworthiness if for no reason other than that.

I cant speak for anyone else but the current President was my best option during the last election cycle. He is human therefore he is flawed not perfect. the President has not lost credibility with me. if the option were given to me tomorrow to vote for either President Obama vs Mitt Romney I would still gladly vote for President Obama.

The entire ACA debacle revolves around the fact that Obama failed to anticipate the extent to which the right would obstruct any and all measures put forward with his stamp, regardless of origins or authorship. Obama is NOT a liberal by any definition I would find acceptable. He is in fact a moderate pragmatist whose politics are demonstrably to the right of Richard Nixon. The very fact that he succumbed to a plan designed and pushed by the insurance industry (to head off universal single payer health care) is incontrovertible proof of this. The reason the ACA is a convoluted nightmare and all but impossible to understand lies in the fact that the scheme is designed to accommodate and guarantee profits to a parasitic insurance industry partnered with thieving pharmaceutical companies and predatory for profit hospitals. Obama made the mistake of believing that granting the powerful cartel their obscene profits would guarantee passage of their bill. But the scheme has revealed itself to be a trap. The all but impossible complexity of the ACA turned out to be a cudgel with which the GOP will almost certainly beat him to death. He would have fared FAR better had he simply pushed (even unsuccessfully) for medicare for everyone, and braved the accusations of “socialism”. The United States will eventually be forced into single payer healthcare simply because it is CLEARLY the most efficient solution to the health care nightmare that defines our country. People do not need health insurance. People require HEALTHCARE.

@jerv What I mean is exactly what I wrote. In other words (in my opinion) the intensions of Obama and his ACA are not really about providing good healthcare to all. You can talk about politics of this issue all you want, but that will not change reality. I’ve given up on the Republican Party. They still ask me for donations. I use to to donate regularly but now my answer is not “no” but “hell no”. Now I sit on the sidelines along with the other millions of hapless minions observing the imbroglio’s of the ACA, U.S. Congress and Obama. It is absolutely sickening and sad to behold.

@gondwanalon I actually agree except for one thing; calling it his. It was good when Romney did it, so why is it bad now?

But the party that pushed for Social Security now wants to gut it while their counterparts across the aisle have pulled similar reversals of position simply to remain in opposition. No matter which party does what, they’re right when they do it and the other party is wrong when they do the same damn thing. When they agree, whichever party held the position first must flip-flop. That is what I find sickening. I hate double standards and hypocrisy, and spend every Election Day choosing the lesser of two evils… though which side is less evil varies from election to election.

I am a libertarian so I mostly disagree with Obama but I share some common ground on social issues.

I think credibility is lost when short term political gain completely overwhelms common sense. That is what appears to have happened. The ACA could not possibly work as promised. The problem was 20–30 million uninsured. Out of that number maybe half were what I would call uninsurable meaning they could not afford insurance or had pre-existing conditions.

The problem was that remaining 15 million. Allowing the individual tax credit and expanding the HSAs might have cut that number in half with the added benefit of lowering almost everyone who is already covered premium.

Mandating more coverage (one large size fits nobody) and then covering more people, the overwhelming majority who are completely or partially subsidized is of course going to raise the cost of insurance for everyone that presently has insurance (and are not subsidized) which will be THE problem once the website works.