since you can’t recognise an obvious joke.

That clearly goes both ways.

Maybe we’ve both got too used to dealing with yanks on the internet.

Sorry for trying?

Trying what? When he took office in 2009, he had all the accumulated Unitary Executive authority accrued under Bush plus direct Treasury Ownership of the six largest banks in the country, plus a Senate supermajority and overwhelming House majority, plus the world’s most powerful military.

What did he do with all this in his first two years? Bailouts for the richest of the rich and Mitt Romney’s solution to insurance industry reform. No mortgage debt relief, despite naked criminal behavior by the banks his US Treasury Department then owned. No student debt relief. No emergency authorization to expand Medicaid and Medicare - something even dumb-dumb Trump happily waved through without Congressional approval by way of the Stafford Act. No immigration reform which he had the votes for but was afraid to pass without Lindsey Graham’s blessing. No climate change bill despite the fact that it was John McCain’s fucking bill, he just didn’t want to pass it without McCain’s official endorsement.

He did not try. He was notable for how much he didn’t do, particularly relative to Bush before and Trump after, because he was afraid of looking bad on cable news shows. He was entirely fixated on his public image, rather than on the real social impact of the administration he was orchestrating.

The GOP blocked the aid

The GOP didn’t block shit. They had no majorities anywhere in government for two full years.

The Super majority in the Senate didn’t even last a full year.

Donald Trump did more with a simple majority than Obama did with 60 votes. And when he lost that majority, he pulled every lever available to the executive branch. Trump was turning out executive orders as fast as his fat little fingers could sign them. Obama couldn’t even be bothered to nominate a full slate of federal judges to fill Bush-Era vacancies.

Finally, he didn’t lose shit in 2016. He wasn’t running

He didn’t try to campaign for Hillary in big swing midwestern states. Given how he was underwater on approval through most of his last year of office, maybe it wasn’t even the worst move. But this was yet another instance in which he just couldn’t be bothered to try.

Man, if only.

He wasn’t perfect, sure.

He wasn’t good.

Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office.

The Clintons weren’t advancing universal health care in '93. They advocated a network of regional private plans that would compete for membership under a single regulatory framework. They flatly rejected universal Medicaid expansion. Far from threatening private industry, it was designed as a means of guaranteeing poorer regional networks could thrive with state support (much in the same way Medicare Plan C and the privatized Veterans Care and the privatization of the USPS ultimately are just kick backs to local business owners).

One of the better aspects of the Obama plan was to simply up the qualified enrollment numbers of Medicaid. This was the only part of ACA that really worked. And it was only shoe-horned in to contain costs, as subsidized memberships in private plans had enormous administrative overhead that was normally covered by employers.

But, again, efforts to simply open up Medicaid enrollment to the general population was killed from within the Democratic Party. Even as written, the bill allowed individual states to block Medicaid expansion piecemeal. The private insurance industry had to be protected, both under Hillary’s plan and under Obama’s.

Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure?

If Obama and Clinton had supported Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for CT Senate, back when he won the primary in 2006, their odds certainly would have been better. But Obama and Clinton and their good friend Joe Lieberman had no intention of passing Medicare for All, because they were all - quite literally - heavily invested in the well being of the insurance industry.

Hillary wasn’t likable.

She had an enormous base of support and a rabid following for decades. She’s at least as likeable as Donald Trump.

The DNC is to blame for pushing an unlikable, unpopular candidate

The DNC does what the donors tell them. And Hillary commanded one of the most successful donor-bundling operations in the party’s history. In no small part because so many people liked her.

They’d rather lose with Hillary, than win with Bernie

That’s true. But Bernie also had a huge hurdle of likeability to overcome. He had at least as many dings on his score card, being an East Coast Jewish Man who once said nice things about Fidel Castro. Dude was DOA in Florida on that resume alone.

Where Hillary fucked up (and where Bernie had a lot of potential) was in the Midwest. And all that is thanks to NAFTA. The Democratic Party is still wrestling with the ghost of 1993 and Bill’s decision to move ahead with NAFTA after campaigning against it. Obama fucked Hillary horribly when he pushed ahead with the TPP, which dredged up all those skeletons and gave everyone in the Midwest flash-backs to the de-industrialization of the prior decade.

Trump was able to campaign on “America First” against a Democratic Party that is far too in-bed with international business interests to say anything in defense of domestic labor. Bernie could have countered that, which is the main reason why he was the preferred candidate against Trump.

But then, four years later, Joe Biden takes the stage and makes all the same “pro-labor” noises that Bernie is making. Plus COVID. Plus liberals being too terrified of Trump to contemplate anyone but the safest of safe bets.

Clinton enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while Obama was much friendlier in general to LGBTQ people

Clinton enacted DADT with the blessing of the liberal movement while Obama dragged his feet on gay marriage until long after the SCOTUS had ruled on Obergefell v Hodges. The Respect for Marriage Act wasn’t even Obama’s legislation. It was signed in 2022 under Biden.

Unfortunately, under a fundamentally capitalist system, there’s not a lot that can be done to make sure real wages grow for the workers

Sure there is. The US Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If the President wants to raise wages, one of the most straightforward decisions he can make is to simply raise starting salaries for government workers. This instantly puts upward pressure on the national wage rate, makes federal jobs more desirable, and improves the economic conditions of millions of federal workers.

In fact, this is one of Obama’s few direct actions. He signed an EO raising base pay for federal workers to $10.10 back in 2014. A meager improvement, particularly when national cost-of-living had long since exceeded what amounts to a $20k/year salary. But hey? Notably better than $7.25.

I oppose a strong executive branch that can enact edict without oversight.

That’s cool. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You have no control over the extent to which Presidents exercise their authority.

You might applaud Obama for spending eight years sitting on his hands and boo Trump for taking a direct and aggressive role in shaping national policy. But Obama’s fecklessness put no constraint on his successor. No more than Clinton’s limited Bush. No more than Hoover’s limited FDR.

That’s an awful precedent.

Its a precedent that’s been in effect under dozens of prior administrations. You govern the country with the tools you’re given. Or you don’t. But there’s no reward for pulling a Calvin Coolidge or a Rutherford B. Hayes and sitting on the sidelines while your country circles the drain.

The only precedent you’ll have set is one in which your party gets booted from office when the people you’re selected to represent continue to suffer under conditions you failed to alleviate.

You’re welcome

The ACA specifically prevented socialized medicine, as a hand out to insurance companies. In a lot of ways, it was the best possible deal for insurance companies. It essentially wrote into law that they must exist. If not for the ACA, we wouldn’t all be paying thousands to insurance companies because they’d have been made illegal for all serious illnesses/injuries.