Whereas many times environmental activists pushed Obama do to things he didn't do shyt, not even in areas where he could have moved unilaterally as an executive and didn't need Congressional approval (which he had all that he needed of for the first 2 years regardless). Are you aware of how pissed off environmentalists were during Obama's tenure considering how the EPA and Endangered Species Act were being used? Nixon created those out of nothing when he didn't have to, while Obama had the power to use them and severely underplayed his hand.
Of course it counts. One of the few pieces of Obama's very short list and for most Americans rather pathetic in impact compared to Nixon's list. By the very next election the right-wing mainstream Dems were weaponizing Cuba as a great boogeyman again.
Was he the slightest bit more racist than LBJ or Joe Biden?
White racists have passed significant civil rights legislation at mulitple points in history (Lincoln and LBJ being the two most obvious examples). Being a racist doesn't necessarily mean the person doesn't support fair laws, and their actual actions in office are 10x more important to me than "was a very nice guy but didn't do jack shyt".
On Civil Rights issues Nixon did multiple things that were anti-Black, including opposing busing and slow-playing desegregation. But wait....Biden opposed bussing too and the entire Democratic party has completely given up on bussing as well as desegregation!
How Joe Biden Became the Democrats’ Anti-Busing Crusader (Published 2019)
With a school desegregation lawsuit roiling Delaware in the 1970s, Mr. Biden led an effort in the Senate to end court-ordered busing.
But while Nixon (and Biden) were publicly opposing those initiatives, Nixon was also doing a great deal positive in civil rights and I don't see evidence that he had to. Here's one quite objective analysis of how his positive moves offset his public opposition to bussing and forced desegregation:
"Yet in civil rights policy, as elsewhere, Nixon’ policies were too variable, unpredictable, and even contradictory to sustain a characterization as racial reactionary. One of Nixon’s earliest initiatives as president, acting on his campaign support for “black capitalism”, was to create in the Commerce Department an Office of Minority Business Enterprise. During his first administration, Nixon sent budgets to Congress that increased agency appropriations for civil rights enforcement from $75 million in 1969 to $2.6 billion by 1972. Despite his anti-busing rhetoric, Nixon supported the quiet but effective efforts of George Shultz, first as labor secretary and then as OMB director, to coordinate peaceful school desegregation throughout the South. Partly as a consequence, the proportion of black children attending all-black schools in the South fell from 68 percent in 1968 to 8 percent in 1972. Nixon also supported a shift in the Bureau of Indian Affairs towards self-determination policies for tribal Indians, and continued (grudgingly) his long-established support for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Nixon’s most radical, and puzzling, departure from traditional Republican principles, however, came with his promotion of the Labor Department’s plan for minority hiring preferences in federally assisted contracts. The Republican party since its founding in the Civil War era had promoted government support for business expansion and opposed government regulation of private enterprise. Since 1964…Republicans had agreed that the Civil Rights Act, like the Constitution, was color blind. The Nixon administration’s Philadelphia Plan, however, required race conscious employment policies to compensate for past discrimination."
It took a big political fight to make it happen, with an initial failure to get it through followed by Republicans and liberal dems forming a coalition to override moderate/conservative dems, and a Supreme Court challenge needing to be overcome. Was it political? Of course. But consevative Southern dems fought against it because they wanted to support White labor, and Biden likely would have included himself among their number if he had been in office at the time. Nixon isn't some hero, and he's not a good president. It's just indicative of how pathetic the Democratic party has been that their leaders can be compared to him.
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