Interesting. Yglesias obviously has his own political bias, but tends to be careful about facts in my experience.
The Obama administration’s policymaking is not beyond criticism, but I do think the facts laid out in this report offer a considerably different context for assessing the administration’s economic track record. The left has often portrayed Trump’s win as, on some level, a punishment for the failures of neoliberalism with its endless inequality and stagnant wages. And a lot of elite-level thinking in progressive circles during the Trump years was driven by a determination to avoid the mistakes of Obamaism rather than to try to replicate its successes. It’s easy to forget now that he’s president, but Joe Biden received almost shockingly little elite support for a former vice president until very late in the cycle — he was seen as offering Obamaism 2.0 and was deemed unacceptable by people who saw Obama as a failure.
But if you understand the Obama record as successfully altering the inequality trajectory and bringing median income to an all-time high, that casts his other achievements (lower greenhouse gas emissions, marriage equality, etc.) in a different context and makes the idea of “let’s beat Trump and keep on keeping on” look more plausible.