Well, one has to understand that I am one of the 40+% of the people who more or less supported "W" (despite having some major problems with him) and didn't vote for Obama. Albeit Mccain was not my first choice for president, I kind of wanted Rudy Giuliani, but the primaries didn't go that way.
Generally speaking I don't HATE Obama, he doesn't worry me as much as say John Kerry did (and I guess a lot of people feel that way since Obama won and Kerry didn't) but in the end I kind of feel he's a celebrity president more than a functional one. Truthfully, coming into office in a time of crisis he has mostly simply not messed up on any catastrophic level, but has at the same time done nothing good. In the US he gets by mostly by being Black and liberal, and abroad he gets by simply by not being "W" and so far coming accross as being someone who is willing to sell his country up the river in the long term for the sake of short term diplomacy... though he has yet to actually do anything there.
Generally speaking Obama's presidency can be summarized as him running the biggest embarassment of an inaugeration in history (massive, overdone, and expensive during a time of financial crisis), starting a major cr@pstorm over health care, and scoring a nobel peace prize because he's apparently willing to open dialogue with nations/cultures that we have pretty much locked out until they make changes for some pretty good reasons.
I expect the health care thing to pretty much go nowhere fast due to deadlock and all of the political opposition on both sides of the fence... whether he succeeds or not. People care about the inaugeration, but whether it will be remembered as an issue in 4 years when the next election comes up remains to be seen.
Right now the biggest thing he's facing, and what even some critics even say could backfire, is his foreign policy. Sure the nobel peace prize shows that what he says he wants to do is popular, but doing the popular thing is not always the right thing.
Speaking totally out of context from how it's normally discussed, the basic impression I get is that a lot of countries that deal with us, want to be able to trade freely with countries we've locked out/ended diplomacy-trade with/etc... without having to get involved in under the table games like France in the "Oil For Food" scandal. A lot of nations including some like Canada do not like their alliances with us (and other nations following our lead more directly) causing them problems when they want to cut deals to their immediate benefit.
While peace/trade/dialogue is a wonderful thing in most cases, I think it overlooks why we wound up in this position in these places to begin with. Doing what Obama seems to plan might be to some people's benefit in the short term, and popular for that reason, but in the end I think it's going to be a bad move, and putting the genie back into the bottle and reasserting some of these policies/relations is going to be difficult. Maintaining a blockade/embargo/etc.. is much easier than letting it down and then trying to re-build it under duress especially if allies you need for these kinds of embargos start trading there and making a ton of money they don't want to give up for someone else's benefit.
So basically I kind of feel that his Nobel Peace Prize is liable to turn into a boomerang that is going to smack him in the head if he continues down that path. Truthfully though I think he will though simply because of the attention it will get him, and the excuse "I wuz trying to be a peacemaker" will still sound good after the fact no matter what kind of chaos he causes and he might "deeply regret, despite the best of intentions" down the road.
I look back at when "The War On Terror" started and how key allies in the UK and such warned Bush about who he decided to work with now, and how it could bite him in the rear. Specifically in regards to Pakistan. He tried to deal with them, and arguably it has become one of the most sensitive issues/biggest problems in the entire War On Terror. We never should have considered them any kind of an ally at all and simply an extension of the entire Afghan front like a lot of people seemed to want to.
I digress however, the bottom line is that Obama hasn't done anything massively dumb yet, but certainly seems to be getting ready to. Even some of the media he's been a darling to is very slowly seeming to come around to a "WTF" position in places.
Unless he turns around I can see that 7% lead he had being totally gone come the next election, along with whatever other problems he's created.
As far as building up troops in The Middle East, well it doesn't surprise me. Bush and Cheney were greedy and turned the entire thing into a mess to make money. However our basic involvement in the region was both sound, and the right thing to do. Nobody with half a brain truely believes that the threat from the region is gone, and with our troops down there we're at least having armed soldiers attacked in THEIR back yard as opposed to those same fighters finding ways into the US to kill civilians in OUR back yard.
Of course this kind of stalemate is ridiculous and not good for us in the long term. I've talked about what we should be doing in the region before, but that is neither here nor there.
The bottom line is that I think Obama meant it when he said he wanted to do a total troop pullout, I think he still WANTS to do it, but I think the fact that he's not stupid is why when he had all the information availible to the actual president he hasn't actually done it quite like he implied.
Of course he might STILL do it as a political stunt, but in the long run we're going to pay a hefty price for it.
