Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"?

Trump is threatening to use an actual Constitutional power that he does have to full some appointive vacancies and de facto deprive Congress from reviewing it. (Brett Samuels and Jordain Carney, Trump threatens to adjourn both chambers of Congress The Hill 04/15/2020)

What legal complications there might be, I don't know. And, yes, someone other than he came up with the idea because it's unlikely in the extreme that Trump himself has ever read the Constitution, much less understood what he read.

I'm very concerned about the overextension of Executive power in the US, especially in foreign policy and intelligence matters. John Dean's Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004) focused heavily on how the Cheney-Bush Administration abused government secrecy during their first term. They continued to do so afterwards. Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason (2007) was largely an highly critical look at the abuses and dangerous expansion of Executive power throughout that Administration.

The exaltation of the Executive Branch longs preceds the neoliberal era identified with the Reagan Administration. Andrew Bacevich writes in The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020):

Today, with Donald Trump occupying the office that was once Kennedy's, it is useful to recall how, in the decades after World War II, the president became something bigger than a head of government and grander than a chief of state. Entrusted with the authority to order a civilization-obliterating nuclear attack, he served by common consent as "leader of the Free World."

By and large, Americans approved of this development, deeming it necessary and perhaps even fitting. After all, who better than a white heterosexual God-fearing American male to shoulder such awesome responsibilities? Presiding over the West's most powerful nation, the president was, by common consent, the most powerful man anywhere outside the Communist Bloc. The Free World obviously needed a leader. Who but our guy could possibly do the leading? [my emphasis]

But the Executive Branch today operates in a context of asymmetric partisan polarization.

Which means that the Republicans are both more aggressive in using Congressional power to stymie Democratic Presidents (Clinton and Obama) and employing election chicanery (segregationist voter suppression, stealing the 2000 Presidential election in Florida with the help of a partisan Supreme Court) and in aggressively expanding Executive power under Republican Presidents. While the Democratic leaders have to be dragged kicking and screaming into fighting the Republicans, as we saw in the Trump impeachment.

And when we look at the current Trump threat on appointments - it's difficult to even imagine Barack Obama or Joe Biden making a comparable threat against a Republican-dominated Congress.

And that brings my mind back to real lost opportunities from the Obama Administration:

• Obama ran for and won the President in 2008 using a movement-building model. When he became President, he folded the Obama for America organization into the Democratic Party structure and discontinued the "50 state strategy" that Howard Dean as chairman of the party had used to build the party organization nationwide.
• When he took office, he proposed a notoriously "pre-compromised" proposal for stimulating the economy after the 2008 crash, at a time when he had maximum popular capital taking over in the middle of the Great Recession much to the chagrin of more progressive economists like Paul Krugman.
• As Ryam Grim describes in detail in We've Got People (2019), Obama's team was ready to throw in the towel on the Obamacare program, and had to be pushed by grassroots organizers and Nancy Pelosi (!!) to keep pushing for it. And he tossed the public option overboard, never seeming to take it seriously. (Hillary Clinton had supported a public option in the 2008 primary race, Obama had not.)
• Obama was at his eloquent best in denouncing the disastrous Citizens United decision early in 2010. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." But his response amounted to a half-hearted attempt to get a legislative fix which the Republicans quickly shot down. After that, the issue was essentially just added to the standard list of issues on Democratic Party fundraising appeals. I don't see how anyone could seriously argue that Obama's response on Citizens United and campaign financing more generally even came close to taking his own initial rhetoric on it seriously: I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.
• When the death of rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia presented him with a Supreme Court vacancy in early 2016, Obama nominated Merrick Garland. "Widely regarded as a moderate, Garland had been praised in the past by many Republicans, including influential senators such as Orrin Hatch of Utah." But, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared any appointment by the sitting president to be null and void." (Ron Elving, What Happened With Merrick Garland In 2016 And Why It Matters Now NPR 06/29/2018) Did Obama bring anything like the pressure on the Senate Trump is threatening over Administration appointments this week? Not remotely.

And now we have Joe Biden as the Democratic Presidential candidate, ready to continue the asymmetric polarization, looking for compromises with a continually radicalizing Republican Party, without remotely attempting the partisan pressure that Republican apply against Democrats. Here are Michael Brooks and his team discussing Obama's endorsement of Biden, with the Obama video included, Obama’s Biden Endorsement: Talking Left, Walking Right (TMBS 135):

Although I take it for granted that Obama's Administration was far better than the low bar set by the Trump Administrtion, he was much more a transactional rather than transformative President. And it could be many years before the Democratic Party has the chance that Obama clearly had to change the asymmetric partisan polarization in a way that favored Democratic and progressive priorities. But that was not what he or the Democratic establishment wanted.