Democrat

Barack Hussein Obama

Background | Views the Issues | Fact Checks

Background

The 44th president of the United States has no primary challenger, but his toughest opponent my be an economy that hasn't budged much since he took office in 2009.

Obama was swept into office on a platform of hope and change, but he found jump-starting the economy to be a difficult proposition. An $814 billion stimulus did not drop the unemployment rate, though the White House argued that things would have been much worse without the aid to state workers, tax cuts and infrastructure project funding the stimulus provided.

He fought a bruising battle to overhaul America's heath care system, only to watch his party lose control of the House of Representatives and trim its majority in the Senate. And the overhaul itself awaits arguments and a ruling by the Supreme Court, which could declare it unconstitutional.

On Obama's watch, Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. But he is pilloried by the right for being soft on Iran, and by the left for keeping detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

He let the Bush-era tax cuts stand, outraging liberals who want the wealthy to pay more. But his attempts to raise taxes on the rich get tarred as "class warfare" by conservatives.

Obama has tried to refrain from commenting on the Republican field before a nominee is chosen, though he occasionally gets drawn in when he is directly criticized. He took the GOP rivals to task for saying that waterboarding is not torture and that they would resume the discredited practice if elected. "They're wrong," Obama said. "Waterboarding is torture, it's contrary to America's traditions, it's contrary to our ideals, that's not who we are, that's not how we operate."

Views on the Issues

Fact Checks

From his April 3 speech to news executives at the annual meeting of The Associated Press:

OBAMA: "You'd think [Republicans would] say: 'You know what? Maybe some rules and regulations are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or credit card companies or mortgage lenders.'"

THE FACTS: As zealous as they sound on the subject, Republicans aren't proposing to throw out all regulations. Mitt Romney, for one, proposes changing, but not repealing, the Sarbanes-Oxley law that tightened accounting regulations in response to corporate scandals. He does want to repeal the Dodd-Frank law toughening financial-industry regulations after the meltdown in that sector, and he wants environmental rules loosened to spur energy production. Even in the heat of GOP primaries, however, Romney wasn't talking about throwing out the federal rulebook. "We don't want to tell the world that Republicans are against all regulation," he said. "No, regulation is necessary to make a free market work. But it has to be updated and modern."

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OBAMA: "Cap and trade was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans as a market-based solution to solving environmental problems. The first president to talk about cap and trade was George H.W. Bush. Now you've got the other party essentially saying we shouldn't even be thinking about environmental protection; let's gut the EPA."

THE FACTS: Obama is right that cap and trade was a Republican idea -- first put in place to control sulfur dioxide emissions, or acid rain, under the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that passed overwhelmingly. The idea is to cap overall emissions of a certain pollutant while letting companies trade pollution allowances, essentially using a combination of the government and private market to make the environment cleaner. But in recent years, cap and trade failed when Democrats controlled the Senate and the House. Moreover, Republicans argued the legislation was not a truly market-driven mechanism. It would have auctioned off pollution allowances to companies, raising money for the government to help offset higher energy bills and invest in cleaner energy technologies.

They wanted a system that would distribute the allowances for free, letting the private market determine their value. That's how it worked with acid rain.

Republicans have not abandoned the notion of environmental protection, although the presidential primary rhetoric -- all geared to more drilling and energy production -- could lead one to think so.

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OBAMA: "There is a reason why there's a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate, since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got coverage, in contrast to a single-payer plan. Now suddenly this is some socialist overreach."

THE FACTS: Again, true. But not the whole story. Many Republicans into the 1990s, and in some cases beyond, supported the idea of requiring people to have health insurance, even if they disagreed with Democrats on how universal coverage should work. Now that idea is decidedly purged from the GOP mainstream.

But until he became president, Obama, too, thought a mandate was a bad idea. In the 2008 campaign, it was his "core belief" that everyone would get health insurance, without the coercion of a mandate, if only high-quality coverage were affordable. He relentlessly criticized his primary opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton in debates, speeches, ads and mailers for proposing a mandate, taking it so far that she waved one of his mailers in the air and barked, "Shame on you, Barack Obama," slamming "your tactics and your behavior in this campaign."

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OBAMA: "At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003. We were promised that these tax cuts would lead to faster job growth. They did not. The wealthy got wealthier. We would expect that. The income of the top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent over the last few decades to an average of $1.3 million a year. But prosperity sure didn't trickle down."

THE FACTS: You wouldn't know from his statement that taxes in 2001 and 2003 were cut across the board, not just for the wealthy. President George W. Bush's package trimmed rates for all taxable income levels, doubled the child tax credit and substantially raised the amount of money people can put in individual retirement accounts. The political fight these days is over whether to keep extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest. Obama supports keeping the lower rates for the rest and has pushed similar tax cuts of his own — excluding the wealthiest, however.

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