Approve (D). It's quite entertaining to see the libertarians and the commies teaming up in this thread.
He came into office promising hope and change in Washington, yet he's only contributed to the existence of the most gridlocked congresses in the history of this nation.
In 2009, the Republican Congressional Caucus held a meeting in which they literally decided to vote against the president on every issue, no matter what. I'm not sure what Obama was supposed to accomplish with that.
His stimulus plan has resulted in a sluggish recovery that has left underemployment in double digits (it was in single digits during parts of '07), has left wages stagnant, and has kept labor force participation anemically low.
What do you think he should have done differently? Certainly the Republican economic plan ("Deregulate everything!", "Also, cut taxes for rich people!") would only have made things worse. It's also not fair to blame Obama for everything that has gone wrong with the economy in the last seven years considering a) he inherited a problem that took far longer to create than he had time to fix it; and b) for most of his presidency, Congress has refused to lift a finger to help. If FDR couldn't end the Great Depression in 12 years with a compliant Congress, I'm not sure how Obama was supposed to end the Great Recession in 8 years with a combative Congress.
His health care plan was rammed through with unconventional legislative maneuvers
Um, no. He spent most of 2009 trying to bring Republican Congressman on board by scrapping his more ambitious proposals (as history shows, a useless endeavor).
and he's refused time and time again to make sensible changes to it.
Actually, Obama has been quite open making "sensible changes" to the law: the problem is that the Republican Congress has never been able to decide what it is they want him to change. He even suspended part of the law
at John Boehner's request in 2014. What did the GOP do then? They sued him.
He dragged his feet in terms of getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fair enough, though as usual the GOP has accused him of going too fast on this.
He frequently holds up attempts at congressional compromise because he's addicted to a life of clean debt ceiling raises, despite the fact that the one time he gave in, we got the 2011 budget control act, which wasn't and isn't a bad act.
Furthermore, he effectively allowed HRC to break the rules by using private email (It has come out that his aids probably knew),
Frankly, I doubt this would be an issue were Clinton not a presidential candidate. The people (or at least the politicians) talking about this aren't really concerned about following the law, they just want dirt on their political opponents and are disappointed by the lack of real scandals.
and on one occasion he even told the justice department to disregard a law (when he told them to stop defending DOMA. I didn't support DOMA, but that doesn't change the fact that upholding all the laws, even the ones you hate, is the president's job.).
Enforcing the law and defending the law in court are not the same things. If a law clearly violates the Constitution (as the Supreme Court later verified), the president should not waste taxpayer dollars trying to pretend it doesn't.
McCain and Romney wouldn't have been better, but this nation can do a lot better than Obama.
We also could have done a lot worse.
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