Barack Hussein Obama
Born: August 4, 1961
Term in Office: 2009-2017
This guy is the only one of the Oval Office occupiers to be born after me, the last two each breaking records, in turn, as the oldest person to serve as president.
He's almost too easy to caricature... Just stretch his chin out, enlarge his teeth, and go crazy with those ears. I've actually gone pretty easy on that last feature. Some versions I've seen have gone to wild extremes.
He's a guy who folks on the right mis-labeled a socialist and who frightened them very much... to the point that the guy in charge of the Senate Republicans blocked Obama's Supreme Court nominee from consideration in the early part of his last year in office (a 'policy' that was conveniently reversed in Trump's last two months). Mitch McConnell and John Boehner did everything they could to block any and all parts of Obama's agenda, refusing compromise on any point.
This guy has been described as someone who, at one time, would have been considered Republican in his thinking, aside from trying to bring the U.S. into the 21st century and inline with every other industrialized nation by providing health insurance to the country. Though, there's an argument to be made that Obamacare (under a different name, of course) was actually proposed by conservatives much earlier, as seen in the next paragraph...
This from a 2011 article on the Daily Beast's page:
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein (who also writes for Newsweek and The Daily Beast) argues that the problem with Republicans today is that President Obama is following their ideology, cribbing ideas from the GOP of the mid-1990s and leaving today’s Republicans without some of their signature policies. Some of Obama’s biggest legislative battles over the past two years were just ‘90s flashbacks, Klein writes: a health-care proposal with an individual mandate, which was proposed by conservative economists 20 years ago; a cap and trade tax, which Republicans supported to combat sulfur dioxide; and the famous tax hikes of George H.W. Bush. Republicans were wildly popular with these policies—so why did they abandon them? “It appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals,” Klein writes.
I didn't agree with everything Obama did, but it was kind of nice having an articulate guy speak to us from time to time, which made the administration following his a horrific nightmare.
Peace to all, and make sure we don't re-start the Trump nightmare in 2024.
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