You say you understand why the debt increased…and then despite the fact that most of it was due to factors outside of his control you keep blaming Obama for it. Just because.
What exactly do you think he should have done to have stopped this? Under his watch the recession ended and economic growth has been steady, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been effectively would up… oh, except that it’s also his fault for pulling out of Iraq too soon thus somehow causing the rise of ISIS. So he somehow had to keep the troops in Iraq (against agreement and the will of the Iraqi government) and immediately turn an economy in freefall into a booming one without spending any money.
Obama did agree to significant spending cuts but the idea that there are somehow billions in wastage just lying around to be cut is largely a right-wing lie (well, apart from all the money spent on politically-motivated investigations, and the increase in debt servicing caused by the government shutdown, neither of which were down to Obama). And you may recall that the Republican Congress stomped its little feet and demanded more and more tax cuts, yet you appear to think if he’d tried just a little harder Obama could have gotten tax increases passed and it was only out of fear of being unpopular that he didn’t.
Methinks this argument is not well-grounded in reality.
Stuff like the Smart on Crime initiative. The DOJ disliked the law requiring minimum sentences on drug charges, so they simply decided as a matter of policy they would not indict anyone on such charges, but find other charges which didn’t carry minimum sentences.
These are just examples. There’s also the New Black Panther intimidation case, in which several members of the DOJ testified that it was DOJ policy to only enforce voter intimidation when it was white defendants and black victims, and not the other way around.
And so on. It’s hard to remember every example over 8 years. But the pattern has been clear.
It would be better to have a policy of outright nonintervention than to have a policy of bluff and bluster and then put our tail between our legs when we have to put up or shut up.
Obama’s foreign policy took a turn for the weak once Clinton and Gates were gone.
It could certainly get worse for the United States, the president’s first responsibility in case it needs to be pointed out. Kudos to Obama for not knee-jerking America into another byzantine morass of a Middle East conflict with no easy solution or way out. In case anyone needs to be reminded again, extremists in the ME, and presumably Putin, want to draw America into another bottomless pit of warfare that will validate their claims of America as the devil incarnate. I give Obama full marks for resisting their influence. Blaming him instead for atrocities perpetrated by other countries is playing into the hands of the terrorists.
They thought enough of it to join with him in sanctions against Iran which ended in a seemingly unattainable alternative to war and aggression with the devil himself. “Influencing” the world through military intimidation is what got America into this mess in the first place, but too many Americans act like they suffer from short-term memory loss. What’s the word for repeatedly doing the wrong thing and expecting a different result?
To the OP, my view from America’s hat is that Obama was a lot more than a good manager, maybe even revolutionary from an American perspective. He delivered on both the hope and change in his slogan, first by getting health insurance for millions more Americans. How many other presidents tried and failed to accomplish that, or didn’t bother to try? He’s the one who took the bull by the horns and did it. Critics who blast it for not being perfect sound like they’d junk a new ambulance because it got a flat tire.
Altering the course of American foreign policy away from The Swaggering Bully that the world hates was a major part of the “change” in his slogan, and in that, he delivered as promised. I and most of the rest of the world give him an A+ for that.
For doing all that while keeping his cool and integrity in the face of unprecedented obstructionism and disrespect for the office, much of it fueled by racist attitudes, he gets an AAA+++.