Remember when Obama went his entire term just about with positive job numbers and economy?
Obama walked into office the week that the Great Recession rebounded. And he spent his first 100 days focused on bailing out the banks, propping up private industry, and prosecuting our wars in the Middle East. Of course the on-paper first term looked stellar. We had nowhere to go but up.
And yet… his 60 vote majority Senate dithered on immigration, health care, and climate change because he was so overly invested in “bipartisan” legislation. He didn’t close Gitmo, like he campaigned on. He didn’t exit Iraq, like he campaigned on. He didn’t prosecute any of the banksters. He didn’t even route the trillions of dollars in treasure bailouts to homeowners, resulting in some of the highest foreclosure rates of the crisis happening on his watch, while banks recapitalized at record speed (and turned a ton of that cash into campaign ads against him in the following election cycle).
Republicans took advantage of his casual even-handed approach to governance by stabbing him as many times in the back as they could. They fought him in the courts. They fought him in the media. They held up every bill possible in the Senate. They gerrymandered every House seat and state legislative race at their disposal.
And when 2010 came around, they brutalized the Democratic Party, as a result. Obama showed up with a handshake to a knife fight, when he could have been packing heat.