Like every other President to have existed Obama did good things. And bad. People tend to focus on negatives far more than positives. I doubt that anyone can honestly say that X President did a "good job" or "bad job" in totality. And even then a person would base their belief on what they personally wanted more. IE: Immigration vs economics or equality vs equity etc etc.
IMO Obama did fairly decent economic wise. Social wise he sucked.
The above is a wonderful example of false equivalency - he's saying (in so many words) "every politician is just as bad as the other", or "all politicians are corrupt".
He looks at the fact that under Obama, we had the longest stretch of private-sector job growth in our nation's history, we had the highest percentage of Americans covered by health insurance in our nation's history, we had the best economic recovery of the nations affected by the Great Recession,
we had higher average job growth per year under Obama's last six years than Trump's "we're doing SO much better than Obama"
first year...AND Obama did all that while facing the worst degree of political obstruction (
from day one) than that faced by any president since Lincoln...
...but Kal'Stang still calls Obama "fairly decent" on the economy.
Then he says Obama "sucked" social-wise. I'm not sure where he's getting that from...unless one's strongly
against LGBTQ rights or strongly
for the "right" of businesses to serve certain customers for religious reasons, or if one thinks that Obama constantly used racially-inflammatory rhetoric (which is what many on the Right (esp. among the Tea Party and InfoWars crowds) tried to claim).
Under Obama, we were very well-respected among most nations of the world. Under Trump, that's no longer true - Trump has effectively abdicated our nation's preeminence among the nations of the world. Obama led ALL the nations of the planet to join in the Paris Accords (well, except for Syria and Nicaragua, who have both since joined)...and when has an American president (or any other world leader) EVER led all the nations of the world to agree on anything before? Yes, Obama did accomplish something no other world leader had ever done before. Trump pulled America out of the Paris Accords...but the rest of the world remains. Obama also led NATO, Russia,
and China to the diplomatic agreements with Iran...and that in and of itself is a truly significant accomplishment by an American president. Obama was pushing the creation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in order to maintain our nation's economic primacy in the Pacific Basin in the face of China's rise...and Trump pulled us out. Australia's still trying to preserve the framework of the TPP, but it's far weaker than it would have been without America, and so China is filling the vacuum of trade influence left by Trump's "America First" idiocy.
Did he make mistakes? Sure - as Kal'Stang implied, all presidents do good things and bad things - but the key is that by any objective measure (outside of Moscow), and unlike most presidents,
Obama's positives FAR outweighed his negatives...especially given that what few scandals did occur were in large part either blown way the heck out of proportion or even made up out of whole cloth by those who hated him. Otherwise, compared to most other presidencies, Obama's administration was almost scandal-free.
In time, historians will agree that Obama was not just a good president, but a great one...and it will be noted with sadness and regret that much of what he accomplished was flushed down the toilet thanks to Trump's narcissism and the ever-growing white nationalism pushed by right-wing media and endemic among much of the GOP as a whole.
