Nice Speech, Why Didn't You Do Something?

You know, when you were President yourself?

Obama is a hard person to dislike, and gods know he gives a great speech, but right now, reading through it (I didn't watch/listen) I mostly keep being reminded of how a lot of this is his fault.  Not because of the nonsense the right has vomited up about him and socialism and "Most Liberal President Evah(TM)" but because, despite the obvious craziness of the right (and the GOP in general) in this country he worked so fucking hard to try to meet them in "the middle" on policy grounds, to make them happy in the hope that they would come sidle over to him on some grand bargain.  The ACA is one example (and probably not the best since it's not clear anything better could have passed...though wouldn't it have been great if he'd tried?). 

The foreclosure crisis (shovel money at banks, fuck homeowners who were lied to by said banks), immigration (deport lots of people), militarism (we're not in Afghanistan anymore are we...oh, wait), and more are areas where he just was not good, and not because his hands were tied by congress but because he chose to be. 

Dreamers notwithstanding he was bad on immigration, Trump is worse, but if Obama had actually been good (or at least better) then Trump wouldn't have had the infrastructure to be worse (and it's pretty fucking apparent that without preexisting infrastructure he's too incompetent to do a damned thing). 

Additionally, he was in charge of the DOJ when there were investigations into both Hillary (for something stupid) and Trump (for something that was maybe stupid but only until he won the election, though there's likely a lot of legitimate illegal activity there too...just not as consequential to the country).  We heard about one of those investigations, during the campaigning, a lot...and the other?  Not so much, or really, at all.  The FBI doesn't answer to congress, it answers to the President, yet Comey (a Republican) was doing the GOP congresscritters bidding...whether or not he knew it.  Comey was not good, but he was Obama's pick, and Obama could have picked someone better. 

I could go on, but it's been gone over before.  The ability of Obama to give a great speech shouldn't hide the fact that he could have been a much better president, and if he had, we maybe wouldn't have ended up with the clusterfuck we have now.