Hot take: Obama was a worse president than Joe Biden

[Roll Roons]

Obama was a horrible party leader.

The fact is that the deaths/health issues of several prominent elderly political figures in the past few years (RBG, Feinstein, McConnell, Don Young) has led to justified concern that Biden may not be able to serve out an entire second term.

I firmly believe that a president who was even 10-15 years younger than Biden (and had actually been elected on their own merits rather than effectively being a DEI hire like Harris) would be crushing Trump right now, but Democrats had no one better than Biden in 2020 because the bench had deteriorated so badly on Obama's watch.

[Roll Roons]

Obama had everything at the surface level you could want in a President, but he made some major errors in foreign policy and his leadership of the Democratic Party which just about caused its near-extinction at the state level in some parts of the country. Those are some consequences we are still grappling with.

Domestic policy-wise, he was mostly pretty good.

Obama utterly squandered a Democratic supermajority that could’ve been transformative. Meanwhile Biden got a lot done with the tiniest majority a Democratic President has ever had, and got Republicans to cooperate too. Obama is more accomplished on domestic policy only by dint of the huge majorities he had, but if he had Biden’s majority he wouldn’t have gotten anything done.

TBF, the Democratic Senate and House caucuses were much more conservative in 2009-2010 than in 2021-2022. If you think Joe Manchin and Josh Gottheimer were a pain, try dealing with Ben Nelson and Dan Boren.