Obama: The Only Recent President to Cite 'American Exceptionalism'

Only one sitting president in the last 82 years has publicly uttered the magical phrase “American exceptionalism”--care to guess who it is? Ronald Reagan, he of the “shining city on a hill?” George W. Bush, who closed his speeches by asking that “God continue to bless” America? Nope. The only president to publicly discuss (and for that matter embrace) “American exceptionalism” is Barack Obama.

This would be the same president, of course, who is subject to a steadily rising stream of suspicion because of his supposed refusal to give voice sufficient voice to his love of country.

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Republicans, Teabaggers Praise Obama & Democrats on Taxes

This headline is obviously a joke, but it shouldn't be. Since Republicans, and especially Teabaggers, rail on and on about high taxes and how Obama and Democrats are raising taxes, they would be happy with this report, right?

According to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, the vast majority of Americans do not perceive that they have received a tax cut from President Obama. Asked if the President “has already raised taxes this past year,” 53 percent of those polled said that the President has “kept taxes the same,” and 24 percent think that the President has “raised taxes.” A mere 12 percent believe that the President has cut their taxes.

This is an astonishing level of misunderstanding. The truth is that the major tax cuts enacted in the 2009 economic stimulus bill actually reduced federal income taxes for tax year 2009 for 98 percent of all working families and individuals. These tax cuts saved working families and individuals an average of $1,158 on the tax returns they will file by April 15. (The median tax cut was approximately $600.) Link

The Associated Press has more on this as well.

So this begs the question. If objections to Democrats in general and Obama in particular from the Teabaggers isn't about policy (and it isn't), what is the objection? I have a few guesses, but draw your own conclusions.

Longtime Conservative Republican Says Teabaggers Ignorant About Taxes

Bruce Bartlett, a longtime conservative Republican, has a column in Forbes magazine titled "The Misinformed Tea Party Movement." The subtitle is "For an antitax group, they don't know much about taxes."

The thrust of the article is that the Tea Party movement seems to know very little about federal taxes. Not only are taxes not very high, particularly when looked at historically, but they have gone down under President Obama:

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it's hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama's stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800.

According to the JCT, last year's $787 billion stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year. The Tax Policy Center, a private research group, estimates that close to 90% of all taxpayers got a tax cut last year and almost 100% of those in the $50,000 income range. For those making between $40,000 and $50,000, the average tax cut was $472; for those making between $50,000 and $75,000, the tax cut averaged $522. No taxpayer anywhere in the country had his or her taxes increased as a consequence of Obama's policies.

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No You Can't (Featuring John Boehner)

President Obama Is a Failure - Early April Fools Edition

It is remarkable how many people actually believe the notion that President Obama has some how been a failure. It is so laughable that in some ways it should be completely ignored. But since the mainstream media does nothing to set the record straight, we must trudge on.

In an article titled "Obama Gets High Scores on Leadership Report Card" by Paul Bedard of the U.S. News & World Report, Obama gets nearly a perfect 4.0 grade on his leadership skills:

That's according to presidential historian and author Fred Greenstein, professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University. The author of the new Inventing the Job of President has just updated his initial Obama report card and declared the president a "rare political leader."

"Indeed," adds Greenstein, "he may turn out to be the rare political leader who is marked by both a first-rate temperament and a first-rate mind."

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“If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president”

Let's repeat this quote again in its full context so that it can sink in:

“We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.” Link

This quote comes from an article from Bloomberg.com, which is titled "Obama Defies Pessimists as Rising Economy Converges With Stocks." The article goes on to cite some pretty impressive economic accomplishments that have occurred since President Obama took office:

One year after U.S stocks hit their post-financial-crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 68 percent, and it’s up more than 41 percent since Obama took office. Credit spreads have narrowed. Commodity prices have surged. Housing prices have stabilized.

The economy has also strengthened beyond expectations at the time Obama took office. The gross domestic product grew at a 5.9 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, compared with a median forecast of 2.0 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists a week before Obama’s Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration. The median forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.0 percent, according to Bloomberg’s February survey of economists, versus 2.1 percent for 2010 in the survey taken 13 months earlier.

What makes this article even more remarkable is that it flies in the face of two myths that continue to be perpetuated — President Obama has not done a good job handling the economy and the media has a liberal bias. If Obama was doing a poor job handling the economy, I'd be curious what a good job would look like. And if the media had a liberal bias, why doesn't anyone know about these accomplishments?

Highlights From the Bi-Partisan Meeting on Health Reform

More video highlights

President Obama More Effective in Cutting Spending Than President Bush Was

This news come from all places the Washington Times, which has a conservative reputation:

President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.

The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs.

Among the president's victories are canceling the multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor program, ending the LORAN-C radio-based ship navigation system and culling a series of low-dollar education grants. In each of those cases, Mr. Obama succeeded in eliminating programs that Mr. Bush repeatedly failed to end.

President Obama More Effective Than LBJ?

President Obama set a new record last year (2009) for getting Congress to vote his way, clinching 96.7 percent of the votes on which he had clearly staked a position.

That was a bit less than 4 percentage points higher than the previous record, set by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, according to an annual study by Congressional Quarterly.

Yet if you listen to pundits on television and in Washington, you'd think the President's first year has been a disappointment.

Americans Most Admire President Obama; Republicans Admire the President More Than Glenn Beck

President Obama is the most admired man in the world by Americans, garnering 30% of the vote. No one else is even close. In fact, Obama is more admired by Republicans than Glenn Beck.

Part II: President Obama's Brilliant First Year

Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and a columnist for Newsweek magazine, responds to those critics who say Obama hasn't really done anything in his first year of office:

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office. Link

President Obama One of Most Productive Modern Presidents in First Year; Media Fails Again

We often hear Republicans throw around the "L" word when it comes to the mainstream media, but this has been a myth repeated so often by the Right that people just come to accept it. But the media is not Liberal. The only "L" word that would describe it appropriately is Lazy. If the media actually did its job, then it could be called Liberal, since the truth has always had a Liberal bias :)

The point is that while conservatives, with the help of the media, including Saturday Night Live, try to make it seem President Obama hasn't done much as President, there can't be anything farther from the truth. There have been at least 90 important accomplishments or actions taken by the Obama administration in just 10 months in office. The Pulitzer Prize winning PolitiFact.com, as of Nov. 25, has kept 55 campaign promises and has another 160 in the works, while only breaking seven promises.