Your current Obama approval rating (expires 01/20/2017)

[Benton D Struckcheon]

27. Gave him between 60 and 70

...which is a passing grade, by the skin of his teeth.

1. Banks: this is my big issue. Geithner as Treasury Sec'y was an epically awful choice. Only Larry Summers would have been worse, and that's a close call, actually. Geithner's first speech, which I took time off from work to listen to because as far as I was concerned it was the most important speech anyone had made on this subject since FDR's inauguration, was horrific.
As I've noted before, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, a borderline Keynesian, not exactly a radical spirit, was downright apoplectic after that speech, and was ready to call Obama's presidency a failed one right there.
The stress tests that were Geithner's principal answer to the crisis were actually pretty stringent, unlike the joke that was foisted on the eurozone, where the tests they did were so bad some banks that passed wound up folding mere months after they were given a passing grade. So based on this Obama passes this with a 65. The far better answer would of course be the one that fits common sense and is/was called for by voices on the left (Minsky, when he was alive) the right (Taleb) and the middle (Martin Wolf): break up the big banks, reinstitute a strict wall between commercial and investment banking - in other words, bring back Glass-Steagall, necessarily updated for current realities, and possibly even reinstitute the restriction, long gone and forgotten now, on interstate banking.
And, most important of all: BRING BACK THE USURY LAWS!!!!! How dense do you have to be to realize this is what is behind all of this: without usury laws, the profit you can make on finance is UNLIMITED. This is why it attracts greed like ants to a wet pile of sugar.

2. Obamacare: the simple answer was to extend Medicare, at minimum to everyone 55 and older. It is actually a decent program, and Australia actually has a similar system, but it could have been better. 70 on this.

3. Foreign policy: I do not get, at all, his obvious hostility to the leftists of Latin America. Yeah they say stupid crap for their domestic audiences, but so what? Does that justify withholding, which as far as I know he's still doing, recognition of Maduro's victory in the past election? This is, simply, stupid. A dumb, utterly gratuitous insult. 45 on this.

4. Whistleblowers and the surveillance state: I think Snowden should face a firing squad. But that doesn't justify the surveillance state. Obama is turning out to be Nixon's ideal of what a President should be on this subject. The only saving grace here is that he did actually say, in a speech that predated Snowden (Recursion pointed this out), that we needed to start rolling back all the stuff we put in place after 9/11. 40 on this.

5. Drones: I don't get what people's objection to the drones are. It's war. War ain't pretty, but I ain't willing to let our enemies live just because sometimes the wrong people get blown up. The wrong people always get blown up in war. Drones minimize this by a heck of a lot. 90 on this.

6. The stimulus: Naked Capitalism said it was too small, wouldn't work well enough, and would turn off the country to stimulus as a solution. They were right on all counts. 40 on this.

7. The Supreme Court: good picks all around. 100 on this.

So averaging it all out, he passes. Barely.