sadly, at this point, I don’t think he’ll be re-electedMy partner and I were just talking about that the other night…he needs more than his core.
He needs to work on pleasing the people who voted for him, and screw the rest…you know, like Bush II did.  He got up there and did what his voters wanted, and he didn’t give a shit what the rest of the country or world wanted.  
Bush never had the rethugs in congress that Obama has democrats…yet Obama can’t push things through.  Ineffective, spongy.  I know he could do better.

Extreme arroganceon the part of the President and his advisors to assume that he would be reelected.
It was very evident from the nature of his promises to the LGBT community.
I think that some of it came as a result of the polls right after the election that said that the public was willing to give Obama time, considering that the Bush Administration made a mess of this country.
(I do believe that the public was and still is willing to give him time, after all they have no choice…)

I think that the voters…tend to vote for the bastard that they know, rather then the baster that they don’t know.
I also think it depends on who the Republicans choose to run against Obama. I think he would win if the Republicans run Sarah “The Quitter” Palin.  

He was not set up to fail. He has failed to deliver.Following his election, I always thought he needed to have a Major Accomplishment by the fall or people were going to start criticizing him.
Now it’s been over a year and what it appears his signature moment has been catering to corporations with bailouts.  No change in Iraq/Afghanistan, no health care, no major financial reforms, no climate change legislation.
People say, “well he has so much to deal with.”  I’m not feeling sorry for him because Obama asked to be put in this position.
All through the campaign he talked of delivering substantive change, which I interpreted as his willingness to be a 1 term president in order to make sweeping reforms.
But like most politicians, his main goal is to stay in power.
He raised people’s expectations and it’s not surprising people are turning on him now that he’s proven incapable of fulfilling them.  

Nip it nowDon’t listen to polls.
Polls are skewed even if they have the best intentions for whatever it is you believe in. They are like looking at movie reviews before you’ve seen the movie; in some way polls will form your opinions.
The Republican party is good at manipulating the media and feeble minds and will continue to bleed the thought that Obama is not re-electable. If we start buying into it, we’re no better than the birther-deather-tea bagging-Palinese nut jobs who still think Bush was a good president and Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
Our goals? 1) Know who we are – if we look at the big picture with an open  mind we can see more clearly what we stand for  2) Stick together and remember what the alternatives could bring 3) Stop playing into media BS by refusing to perpetuate speak that will inevitably cost Democratic votes.
Is Obama the most gay friendly president we’ve ever had? I would say yes. Does he satisfy all of our needs? Of course not. Do we need him on our side? Yes.

It depends…Is the question, do you want Barack Obama specifically, and if not, would you vote for a Republican instead?
I would vote for a potted plant before I would vote Republican, and be willing to negotiate whether it had to be alive, or would plastic do? I was underimpressed beyond belief with John Kerry (and livid that he was the best the Dems could do), but nothing could get me to vote Bush.
I’d have to think hard, and look at the options if the question was a Democratic primary issue, of Obama versus another Democrat. But vote Republican? Hell no.
And unless a third party candidate was truly viable, I’d say that a third party vote in this political environment would be the same as voting Republican.

CNN PollThe Obama Administration blew the stimulus. Then they blew credit card reform. Right now, they’re busy blowing Health Care Reform. Watch them screw the pooch on DADT. This administration never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I agreeHe was not set up to fail; he was set up to succeed. He managed to fail all on his own.
He came into office with a healthy majority of votes, unlike either Bush or Clinton. He also came into office with large majorities in both houses of Congress and eventually had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The time to convent the 2008 victory into lasting legislative accomplishment was 2009.
He failed.

Apparently, posting this to Democratic Underground gets you bannedThe place has become such a cheerleader echo-chamber that anyone who posts about this poll — research done by a mostly respected and presumably liberal news organization — is grounds for getting banned as “a disruption.”

And here come the cheerleaders! n/t

Umm… my bad. Ignore the above post; I got incorrect infoThat’s what happens when one posts before checking facts. Sorry about that.

how do you follow a shape-shifter?Here’s an interesting look at Obama WRT marriage, esp. where Obama cites the religious basis for his opposition to SSM, when in fact his denomination (UCC) supports it.
Article compares his waffling, somewhat unfavorably, to that of Bill Clinton. Fascinating.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…
I suppose that Obama might be better than a McCain/Palin administration, might be better than the Bush/Cheney administration, but that’s not a terribly high standard.
Where have you gone, Dennis Kucinich, a lonely nation turns its eyes to you, boo hoo hoo. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson …

ObamaObama has been a real disappointment. Right now there is too much hatred against Obama to get re-elected. The next president, if the status quo does not change, will be Romney. I think he will “shape shift” his way into the nomination and get elected. Probably out of all the Republicans available he would probably do the least amount of damage to the country.  

100% fact free!Hey let’s all talk about how we feel, it’s so much more satisfying than those messy facts!
Never mind that a major depression was averted. Never mind hate crimes legislation. Never mind Obama just orchestrated the military brass standing up to denounce DADT. Never mind the defunding of abstinence-only AIDS-related murder.

Romney???You mean the loser who could not even win the nomination last election? Americans won’t vote for a mormon. For what it’s worth the social conservatives were all defeated in the republican primaries also.
How quick we forget.

I agree about RomneyOf all the Republicans, Romney seems to be the most viable as a presidential candidate, and if we had to have a Republican, I’d rather it be him than someone truly scary like Palin or Huckabee. That’s not to say I want him in office, though. It’s pretty much a given that he’ll run on an anti-gay platform and will probably promise a federal gay-marriage ban. Combined with a loss of the Democrats’ majority in Congress, that would make such a ban very possible.
Unless the Republicans run someone in the vein of Lincoln Chafee or Barry Goldwater (with a flying pig from Frozen-Over Hell as the VP candidate), I’m voting for Obama. I’ve been hugely disappointed with his performance, but I’d rather have him than a sincere homophobe.

The fact is…if the economy recovers and people get jobs Obama will get re-elected.
Period.
I’ve never been under the illusion that Obama’s reelection had all that much to do with the gays, actually.

Romney?I would hope that they could find someone better than that. Romney is opposed to both civil unions and marriage equality, supports Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and is a Mormon to boot. His other views (e.g., anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-drug war, pro-death penalty, anti-government-run health care, and anti-tax) aren’t inspiring either and trend toward the bad.

A third party vote is a third party voteThat “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush” crap is just as tired now as it was in 2000.  As long as people who actually TRY to support something other than the duopoly who fail to deliver our rights, time and time again, get castigated by our community for doing so, we’re going to stay stuck in the same position we’re in: hated by one party and sold out by the other.
If a mass of LGBT and allies came out and said “we’re voting for third party or independent X because we’re tired of the two main parties ignoring us” and that candidate got even in the high single digits, you better believe they’d pay attention.  And that’s just NOT “the same as voting Republican.”

I’m more depressed about what they said about CongressEveryone thinks Congress is doing a bad job, yet they’re still going to vote to re-elect their current Congresspeople. WTFIUWTS? Can we say unclear on the concept?

he lost my voteHe won’t be getting my vote unless EDNA is passed, DADT and DOMA are repealed, and UAFA is passed. End of story. Otherwise I’ll be going to the polls and not casting a vote for president. It’s called “none of the above.”

other choicejust because you are in the voting booth, does not mean you have to cast a vote for anyone for president.

And what if the commercial real estate bubble bursts?

BSExplain in detail how this is fact-free. I bet you can’t.

A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evilI, for one, will either vote for good or not vote at all.

Then we’re back where we started and Obama loses
I’m looking now at the states with the higest unemployment rates or, rather, unemployment rates over the national unemployment rate of 10%:
Michigan
Nevada
Rhode Island
South Carolina
California
D.C.
Florida
Illinois
North Carolina
Alabama
Oregon
Ohio
Tennessee
Kentucky
Mississippi
Georgia
New Jersey
Indiana
The bolded states are the states that Obama carried.
A jobless economic recovery = a loss by Obama in 2012.

True, but……in a world where most people don’t vote, no vote doesn’t register as dissatisfaction with the major parties.  It just registers as apathy (even when that’s not what it is).

I actually agree with you about third partiesagain…LET ME REPEAT THIS!
It is the responsibility of a political party or a candidate for office to earn my vote. If I vote Green in 2010 or in the 2012 Presidential elections it will be because they earned it.
I know that the ish’s and Sci Fi Geek’s of the world disagree with me on this, choosing to play the Republican bogeyman card and I’m not even saying that they don’t have a point. I am saying that I have my own set of standards. And…I am only one voter…

Then again…and I considered this…this is exactly what was happening with Reagan in 1982…
http://news.google.com/newspap…

Failed to deliver? Or CAN’T deliver?I think it’s quite clear at this point that Obama lacks the kind of will essential to be an effective political leader.  His idea of political leadership is to make a speech asking everyone to be nice and do the right thing.  Period.  Beyond that, he seems quite uninterested in the practicalities of governing.  How could he possibly have thought he’d last?  And equally to the point, how could his advisers have let him think so?   If Obama and Rahm are really the masterful politicians we keep being told they are, how could they possibly have deluded themselves into thinking that aloof passivity could lead to reelection?

Inevitable.It’s like trying to hide truffles from a pig, isn’t it?

hmmI wonder if they pay attention to those who go to the polls and vote for other things, but skip voting for certain candidates?
I passed on voting for anyone for President when Clinton was up for reelection. To me, the worse thing is throwing my vote away on anyone who doesn’t deserve my vote. That’s REALLY throwing it away. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. If it registers incorrectly to them, that’s too bad, but I’d rather be true to myself.

EXACTLY!

Apathy?Making a conscious decision that neither major party represents you is not apathy.  Quietly falling in line and voting for a candidate who you know hates you is apathy; it is tantamount to an admission that you’ve given up any hope of change or progress.  People who vote for the Dems or the GOP against their own interests are weak-willed, malleable fools.

+10although I don’t think that samritchie was saying that, but he was saying that it appears that way.

I always wondered this about Prop 8how many people in California went to the polls and didn’t vote on Proposition 8 at all.

Very easy to find out.The total turnout for the 2008 general election in California was 13,743,177. Prop 8 was marked on 12,119,369 of those ballots, with 6,322,732 voting Yes and 5,796,637 voting No.
So 1,623,808 of the people who voted — almost 12% — voted “No opinion” on Prop 8.
Had passage required a majority of all ballots rather than a majority of just yes and no votes, Prop 8 would have failed with only 46%.

Thanks TechBear and let’s even factor inthe ~10% of those Yes votes that may have meant to vote “No.”
But that 12% alone is quite significant.
And it’s not even, per se, a case of flipping ~300,000 Yes votes into supporting marriage equality.
It could also be getting a substanial number of “No opinion” voters to care about marriage equality enough to vote for it.

because the Supreme court doesn’t matter!Because it was a Republican who started the Iraq war, not the imperfect Democrat who didn’t get elected?
Because letting a Republican pick the next Supreme Court justices won’t matter?
C’mon. Voting for the Democrats is strategic, not a beauty contest. It’s not quietly falling in line at all.
Electing a progressive third-party candidate would be great. Throwing your vote away on an unelectable fringe party candidate who cannot win is dumb.  

I disagree…and that’s OK.
Do keep in mind that I live in Illinois, which made my 2000 vote for Nader a pretty safe way to register my protest with the Democratic Party. Had I lived in Florida in 2000, would I have voted that way?
Maybe, maybe not.
But it is not “throwing my vote away.” It is about having some sort of standard.
 

Of course the bubble will burst.They all do. At some point in time. This has been pretty much the pattern of the US economy over the last 30 years. Inflate one (property) bubble. Things to swimmingly for a while, then inevitably the bubble bursts. Inflate another (property) bubble. And so on.
Obama’s hope will be that the bursting happens AFTER the election, and not before, like when he got elected.

Please don’t feed the Obamabots.

I’d say that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for war, economic failure and bigotry. Is that what you want, Lymis? Q – How is voting Democrat different from voting  Republican?
A – It’s not. Democrat candidates are Republicans in drag.  
Q – When is a third party viable?
A – When it helps consign the Democrat and Republican Parties to the Dumpster of History. If there’s no socialist or leftist third party write some one in. Hell, write yourself in. It’ll do more good than voting for the next lesser evil to come down the pike making phony promises. Deny votes to the twin parties of deregulation, deadly imperial wars, a recession that’s likely to be a recession when it grows up and unceasing, pig-headed  bigotry.
 

Ish is, as ever, dead wrong. Ish says

“Because it was a Republican who started the Iraq war, not the imperfect Democrat who didn’t get elected?”

Ish, there was some war history before 2000. BushOne ordered the 1991 invasion of the Kuwait region of Iraq that featured the murder of tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi conscripts in the ‘kill box’ north of Basra and indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Clinton followed up with indiscriminate missile attacks, continued support for zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine and an embargo of food, medicines and even sanitary supplies that murdered at least half a million civilians. The difference between Clintons embargo and the murder of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that most of the Iraqi victims were children.
Then, based on Clintons lies about Iraqi WMDs, Bush was able to get a war vote and began his phase of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama genocide to make Haliburton and Texaco rich.
Ish asks “Because letting a Republican pick the next Supreme Court justices won’t matter” That moldering old canard is the last line of defense of Democrats trying to prop up their right wing candidates as they go down in flames.
The answer is – of course not. Courts, like all political institutions, respond to bribes or to mass action. Their ‘progressive decisions’ are sops, not based on fair minded neutral examinations of the question but on the abject fear of servants of the looter class that thing will get out of hand of they don’t make some concession. In Brown vs. Board of Education, the overturn of sodomy laws and the marriage decisions another factor was the embarrassment of being laughed at as hopeless racists and cult infested bumpkins by the legal profession in Europe. It was Republican courts that granted same sex marriage in California and Massachusetts.  
Next, Ish tells us that

“Voting for the Democrats is strategic…”

It is not. It’s unprincipled to vote for war, for subservience to the looter class and for bigots like Obama, and yet that exactly what Ish advocates.  

back to the real worldThis is not Leninist fantasy world, Bill. This is the real world. The Supreme Court does matter. Quite a lot.
I’m not going to defend Clinton’s Iraq policy; nor his bombing of Serbia. Those are indefensible. But Bush’s Iraqi policy was a hundred times worse. You can’t see that, you have a problem.
Someone wins every election, Bill. Sitting it all out is what the sectarian left has done in the US since the 1940s. And yet, the left is in a worse place than ever before.  Worse, Bill. By a lot.
But feel free to hand it all to the teabaggers. It’s what the narcissist left is busy doing.

Meg Whitman says she knows how to create jobsSo goes California so goes the nation.  California is broke.  The government raised taxes so all the rich people left, and the poor moved in drawing entitlements from the state.  How the Ebay founder can change this will be a miracle.  You can’t auction off the redwoods.  China and India are hiring engineers that they educated.  Our academic youth didn’t study engineering but went for a career in Wall Street finance because that was the quick way to get rich.  Keynesian economic majors from Harvard are not in demand.  We need innovators to create jobs and we just don’t have them.

Back in the real world where we have to choose between supporting war or not we can’t do it one the basis of fabrications. Clinton’s embargo murdered about 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children and infants. It was deliberate. It was genocide and infanticide.
BushTwo’s invasion and occupation killed about 600,000. It too was genocide.
Nevertheless ish tells us that “…Bush’s Iraqi policy was a hundred times worse. You can’t see that, you have a problem.” That’s simply not true. It was marginally worse. Ish has the problem, and it not just with math.
It’s a problem of principles, or the lack of them. Obama is the fourth US president in a row to use anti-civilian terror tactics to make US oil companies and war contractors even richer and it’s unprincipled as you can get.  
Promoting Obama wars and occupations and his support for zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine by promoting the old saw that Obama or any Democrat is better than any Republican is why working people face intractable problems like the wars, economic failure and endless years of bigotry and will continue to face them until the Democrats and Republicans are politically eliminated.  
 

Ish, why do you believe in Obama’s Voodoo Recovery uncritically? Obama’s Voodoo Recovery is bull. The are no magick formulas to make the Clinton-Bush-Obama economic failure go away.  
Obama’s economic gurus, the same people who created mass unemployment and homelessness by helping B. Clinton ram through a Republican sponsored deregulation bill, now claim that the fourth quarter of 2009 improvement in GDP – coming in at an impressive 5.7% – heralds the end of the Recession.
Obama told us that he’d avoided depression when he stabilized the markets, by which he meant that he covered the losses of the looter class and insured that AIG will have the wherewithal to pay out about $250 million in promised bonuses. Obama pretended to be shocked but now he says the looters at AIG and the banks ‘earned’ their money’. That abrupt about face is explained by the fact that when Obama was just a Senator on the make he got his own ‘bonus’ of $101,332 bonus in political ‘contributions: Opensecrets.org. Now he’s a President on the make and like LBJ, Nixon, and Slick Willie, he’ll leave office a gazillionaire.  
What shoots down Obama’s latest ‘recovery’ is the fact that for 2009 as a whole GDP shrank 2.4%. That was the biggest annual contraction since 1946. The sharp but temporary upsurge was based on the need to increase inventories which have been dwindling for the last three years. Unemployment, based only on numbers of people with active claims, was 10% by December, 2009. However the real rate  estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for all of 2009 was 16.2% per annum and 17.5% in December. In human terms that’s 15 million people thrown into desperation and poverty. Several million people have lost homes as foreclosures increased 63% in 2008 and continued to climb steeply in 2009. One in every 7 homeowners is facing foreclosure nationally and one in four in California, Nevada and Michigan.  
A recession corrects itself but this one is a non-correcting economic event, that is a depression fueled by massive a 17.5% unemployment and mass homelessness. Those are characteristics of a depression.
Another characteristic of a depression is the inability of employed and underemployed workers to generate a recovery because of widespread poverty. 2009 labor costs increased only 1.5%. Even those with jobs can’t afford to spend enough and since consumer purchases are about 70% of the US GDP the pauperization or workers, the underemployed and the unemployed will push the recession into a depression.
Obama says his priority is no longer job creation but reducing the madly escalating federal deficit. He wants a three year freeze on government stimulus spending. In the 1980′s we used to call that Reaganomics when we were being polite and voodoo economics the rest of the time.
No one should be surprised that Obama is imitating Nixon’s war goals or Reagan’s economic plundering.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently . . . and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.” Gore Vidal

I was out of the countryBut weren’t Clinton’s numbers donw in the dumps at this point in his presidency?  It’s newsworthy that Obama isn’t doing well in the polls, but I don’t really think it’s going to be a reliable prediction of what will happen November 2012.

100% agreement! I’m over the “the GOPs gonna gitcha” threat on 3rd partiesI have voted 3rd party candidates in local/state/national elections in the past, and will continue to do so.
I am at the point of voting my principles instead of assuming I’m being “pragmatic” by voting for Democrats.  Being a Dem is certainly no guarantee of being progressive.
The fear/shaming technique about “the lesser of two evils” is a tool Democrats have used to avoid representing gays/people of color/women, etc.  

I repeat: please don’t feed the ObamabotsObama could personally admit his villainy, in writing, and dweebs like our dear ishy-poo would still urge us all to vote for him.  You could have a more meaningful discussion with your cat.

ExactlyThe whole proposition of “strategic” voting is that voting is essentially like a horse race:  You’re supposed to figure out who’s going to win and then put your money on him.  If a third-party candidate probably can’t win, don’t bet on vote for him.
But the real point of voting is much clearer and simpler than that:  Identify the candidate whose positions most clearly agree with your own, and vote for him.  If more people thought that way instead of falling for the Democrats’ constant whine of “the Court! the Supreme Court!” we would begin to see some serious change in this country.  That is exactly why the Democrats and the GOP collude to shut third parties out of every election they can.
No matter how you slice it, voting for the major parties is voting for the status quo.  And the status quo stinks, for the country as a whole and certainly for LGBT people.  (Even Clinton stooge John Podesta said so recently.)  If the Obama administration (“Hope! Change!”) hasn’t convinced people that the major parties are about stasis, not progress, then nothing ever will, and there is really no hope for America..

Dweeb?Ishy-poo? Obamabot?
Powerful arguments you got there.

Just reading back over the responses…I am in true disbelief that so many here and around the country have fallen into the Republican “Let’s all hate Obama” trap.
Some of you are truly no better than than the tea baggers in that you overly listen to media which is telling you over and over that Obama sucks. Has no one even cared to look at what he HAS done for our community and what changes he HAS made for the country? Anyone?
This sort of dissent is exactly what conservatives want to see amoungst liberals. If you have any questions to those types of intents just look at African American voters and Prop8. Hell, look at the tea baggers themselves…they don’t even know what they’re fighting for. All they know is that someone said they should and that Obama is a bad man.
Someone called me a “cheerleader” earlier. I can certainly understand why you would assume that but if you knew me, you’d know I’m actually not an Obama supporter. I’ll be the first to admit that I am afraid to vote for a third party because I believe we truly cannot afford (esp. with our civil rights) another Christian gun&god Republican putting us back in the dark ages. Having done the research I have on modern Christian infiltration within our government, it makes me extremely wary to not vote for someone who has a chance to beat a conservative. So for me, voting other than Dem. right now is a hard decision…but one I’d like to address.
What I DO support is knocking out the Republican hate machine. Unfortunately it looks as if the machine has begun to fester within our own community and I hate to see it happen.