His Challenge:
When Obama became president in January, 2009, he did so at the absolute bottom of the Great Recession. The stock markets were at their bottom, and America was about to experience mass unemployment, hundreds of bank failures, and budget deficits equal to government borrowing $2.2 million a minute....every minute of every hour, of every day, of every week, of every month of the year. Dubya's legacy was unprecedented economic turmoil. Much of Obama's presidency has been about recovering from the utter incompetence of the previous president.
Obama also faced relentless radical Islamic terrorist insurgency. ISIS was only two years old when Obama took power. It has developed into what may be the world's most effective terrorist organization, ever. Unlike other terrorist groups, it conquered and established a claim to an actual state, replete with administration, taxes and a source of revenue, an army, and obvious control of territory.
During his time in office, an ancient division in the life of America became more marked and dangerous - there is a new racial divide in the USA, marked by the seemingly senseless shootings of Black Men by the mostly White Police. The response has come in the form of "Black Lives Matter", and a rekindling of some subtle racism in America, where in some corners the claim that the police do no wrong is very close to a claim that shooting Black Men is not really a compelling issue.
Obama was tasked with responding to environmental issue, and all the aspects associated with those issues, especially the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the need to respond to the threat of Climate Change, and the question of whether he would approve the Keystone XL Pipeline Project.
Finally, Obama had to try to lead his country in the new directions reflected in his electoral mandate, specifically to do something about heath care in America and to try to heal the Red-Blue divide in that country by increasing bi-partisan cooperation between the Republicans and Democrats.
The Good:
Obama got Obamacare done, which was close to a miracle, and his response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was exemplary, especially when compared to the almost unbelievable incompetence exhibited by Dubya in his response to the Katrina hurricane disaster.
Obama took advantage of a yearning for change and democracy in the Arab world to lead the international community to rid us of the parasites Gaddafi in Libya and Ben Ali in Tunisia.
He moved his country well forward in combating Climate Change by agreeing to the Paris Accord.
The US economy staged an economic recovery of sorts under Obama's administration. More on this below.
The Bad:
The Arab Spring only really took hold in Tunisia; otherwise, it has been a disaster. In Egypt, an elected government was overthrown and replaced by a military henchman. In Libya, Gaddafi has been replaced by a divided nation, with no real central government in control.
Obama's use of drones - they dropped tens of thousands of bombs last year alone, and killed over 4,500 people while he was in office, seemed to suggest that the USA was above international law - just as Dubya's tolerance of torture did before him. This has hurt America's standing in the world.
Obamacare was a success, but only a partial one. Tens of millions of Americans still lack basic health insurance as Obama's plan never had any chance of obtaining 100% coverage. The plan also went out of its way to protect the business profits of American health care providers, failing to bring down health costs in any meaningful way. It will be repealed by the Republicans.
The Ugly:
Obama's foreign policy has mostly been a catastrophe. The policy in Syria - which is regime change - has not only not seen regime change, but has seen the return of Russian as a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East for the first time in decades. Trump's coziness with Putin would have been required of anyone who followed Obama simply because Putin is a player again, courtesy of Obama.
The Syrian catastrophe has also seen millions of people turned into refugees, swamping Europe in a movement of peoples reminiscent of the Middle Ages, stoking Right Wing/Fascist reactions that could have serious consequences for decades to come. Sticking with the policy of regime change literally for years after it was obvious that it had no chance of success was completely incompetent and borderline insane.
Related to this, the advance of ISIS from terrorist group to de facto state could not have happened without Obama essentially abandoning Iraq, regardless of the consequences.
Note - he did NOTHING while ISIS advanced well into Iraq early in 2014, taking over significant cities and territory, untouched by the most obvious weapon in the hands of the West to stop them, namely US air power. How far would ISIS have advanced if the US Air Force and US Navy aircraft had bombed the modified pick-up trucks that constituted their major attack vehicles as they drove through the desert three years ago? One would think that ISIS could have been stopped it its tracks had the Obama administration tried. They didn't, and we have been fighting for three years now to push them back.
On the economy, we also see a record of historic incompetence. Obama claims to have created 15 million jobs while in office. The number is probably closer to 10 million, but he certainly did oversee the addition of 15 million people to the roles of those citizens who are receiving food stamps just to survive (NB - about 43 million Americans are on food stamps now - just shy of one in seven citizens), which is equivalent to the entire population increase in the USA while he was president.
Even if we accept his claim of 15 million new jobs, most of those jobs are part-time. As well, if you add together the total fiscal and monetary stimulus which he was in office - budget deficits, plus Quantitative Easing, plus historically low interest rates (not all within his control), we see stimulus equal to at least $20 Trillion in eight short years. If we accept his claim to have created 15 million jobs, that still works out to $1.33 Million per job.
This is, quite simply, an economic catastrophe, where the burden of this utterly ineffective stimulus will drag down America literally for decades to come.
Conclusion:
America is poorer, weaker, more divided, and facing a future with even more serious challenges than it was when Obama came to power. Dubya + Obama = a watershed in the history of America, from being the preeminent country on Earth to one where America's future is now uncertain.
And Trump?
He cunningly coasted the angst that is properly felt in American after 16 years of appalling governance, and was elected on a promise to "Make America Great Again!" There is NOTHING in the policy suite that he has proposed that will have this result.
What would the end of Pax-American look like? We may be about to find out.
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