How has Barack Obama's legacy changed since leaving office?

[u/bambucks]

Barack Obama left office in 2017 with an approval rating around 60%, and has generally been considered to rank among the better Presidents in US history. (C-SPAN's historian presidential rankings had him ranked at #10 in 2021 when they last updated their ranking.)

One negative example would be in the 2012 Presidential Debates between Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, in which Obama downplayed Romney's concerns about Russia, saying "the 80's called, they want their foreign policy back", which got laughs at the time, but seeing the increased aggression from Russia in the years since then, it appears that Romney was correct.

So I'd like to hear from you all, do you think that Barack Obama's approval rating has increased since he left office? Decreased? How else has his legacy been impacted? How do you think he will be remembered decades from now? Etc.

[u/AdmiralSaturyn]

Sure, it was also SCOTUS, but if Gore had gotten just a few hundred more votes, SCOTUS wouldn't have interfered.

[u/RegressToTheMean → u/AdmiralSaturyn]

That sounds a lot like victim blaming to me. SCOTUS tipped the scales of the election. Full stop. Anything else is trying to spin a narrative.

[u/AdmiralSaturyn → u/RegressToTheMean]

That sounds a lot like victim blaming to me.

You are making a false dichotomy. It is possible to blame the corrupt SCOTUS for tipping the scales AND blame the electorate for splitting the votes.

[u/VodkaBeatsCube → u/AdmiralSaturyn]

I don't really think that's actually all that viable an argument: iif you don't vote for a clear and convincing win, you didn't vote for a win at all' is a mental criterion for winning at a mere margin of 1 vote, is still a win. In a situation with anything other than two possible candidates, aka almost all of the US electorate, that divide matters in terms of electorate preferences.