President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the Tea Party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
The Tea Party movement started in late 2008 as a rejection of President George W. Bush's bailout of the auto industry and Obama's excessive stimulus spending. It evolved into a movement opposed to ObamaCare, and grassroots efforts were employed to find qualified political candidates who could beat incumbents.
Actually, I have been very supportive of a very robust stimulus package from day one. I think this economy has to have a major stimulus initiative because the only group with liquidity is the federal government.
When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party.
When you stop and look at so much of the kind of activism that has been triggered, the Tea Party and the like, as a result of Obama's efforts - TARP, the stimulus package, and now the health care reform - there is a lot of sense this government is changing.
When you talk about the stimulus package, you can ask 1,000 different people and they - you will have 1,000 different opinions of what is the ideal stimulus package.
Trump has been donating big money and influencing politics for years. In fact, while conservative Tea Party groups were working extremely hard to defeat ObamaCare before it passed in 2010, Trump was sending checks to Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders who eventually passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote.
The rules in this new 'post-partisan' era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it's 'stimulus.' If the Republican Party opposes it, it's 'politics' - as in headlines like this: 'Obama Urges GOP To Keep Politics To A Minimum On Stimulus.' These are serious times: As the president says, it's the worst economic crisis since the Thirties. So politicians need to put politics behind them and immediately lavish $4.19 billion on his community-organizing pals at the highly inventive 'voter registration' group ACORN for 'neighborhood stabilization activities.
Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.
Obama passes Obamacare, the Tea Party comes into existence over two things: this out of control Obama spending.
Maybe this Democratic president[Barack Obama] did and can get comprehensive health care reform passed, but notice, Medicaid is not expanded in any of these dark red states. The Republican Party may not be able to repeal Obamacare, but it certainly, through its state legislatures and governorships, has managed to halt Obamacare`s full impact.
Obamacare is his. The stimulus is his. The economy is his. And yet Barack Obama still treats it as though it's being run by others and he's still fighting them and he's running into obstacles.
The Republican Party has consistently opposed Obamacare (as costing more), stimulus spending (as increasing inflation), etc., none of which has happened in spite of seven years of their warnings. Their main problem is that they don't have the character to admit that they are wrong. They don't have enough character to rethink their deeply held assumptions.
Whether it is Obamacare, the stimulus, Wall Street bailouts, the food safety bill - on vote after vote, Bill Nelson has chosen to side with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama over the people of Florida.
If Republicans triumph in 2014, it will undoubtedly be as a result of Obamacare. In 2010, Republicans soared to historic victory because the much-maligned Tea Party spearheaded mass resistance to Obama's takeover of the healthcare industry.
I supported the stimulus package.
The Democrats can't come to grips with the fact that they have been not just defeated, they've been rejected, what they stand for and what they did. And their fingerprints alone with on these things: Obamacare, that stimulus. That's why this is a very risky thing for Donald Trump, this stimulus that he wants to do, but we'll get into that just a second here.