While Clinton came into office with a Democratic majority in 1992, Republicans romped to huge political victories in '94, winning a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. Throughout the rest of his years in office, Clinton faced a Republican congressional leadership that mistrusted and disliked him, helping to lead to his 1998 impeachment for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

You'd think that the voters would realize that the Democrats brought them 8 years of plenty... I think that voters are more susceptible to propaganda than what is in their pocket at any given time.

That's a big factor for more and more people from whom I am hearing disgruntlement with Obama, et al.  The guy had so much political capital that had he tried -- for better bills for the economy, for health care, for more on the agenda even now -- I think that he would have kept his fans just fine.

Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year -- a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

On each and every issue, Obama has paid mere lip service to the things that really matter to the people, and he has played them over and over, and in a terribly passive aggressive way.  Is he on your side or isn't he?  Does he want to help you or doesn't he?  Does he respect your intelligence, or does he regard you as too stupid to really understand the issues?

The beneficiary of this tactic has been, over and over, whatever industry or corporate sector was integral to getting us to where we were; a bone or two was thrown to the masses, but by and large nothing was done that put more than an insignificant crimp in the corporate efforts to enrich their own coffers - at our expense.

That he has been willing, time and again, to abandon the needs of the people and the underlying economy in favor of the policies the "savvy" businessmen he so admires want, and that he is even now working to undermine the social safety net, tells me that he never had any interest in governing and leading from a position of deep ideological commitment to bettering the lives of the average American; this thing others are willing to call "timidity," is something I call "deeply dishonest and ultimately harmful to the health and well-being of the American people."

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, 04/24/09: "[the stimulus is] the biggest tax cut in American history, the biggest infrastructure investment since the interstate highway in the 1950s, the biggest investment in education in a generation and lots more. His budget, which was approved with no Republican votes, shifts a whole range of priorities in a progressive direction and sets in motion a process that will likely lead to major health-care reform this year. Add the other bills and executive orders that seem to get signed practically every week, and the One is moving into Roosevelt's range."