Green New Deal: Obama passed into law the largest green energy subsidies in history, as a portion of his stimulus bill that also happened to be as costly, on an inflation-adjusted basis, as the stimulus spending in the New Deal. Obama reinforced those reforms — which created a viable market for solar and wind power, electric cars, and battery storage out of virtually nothing — with a broad suite of regulations that drove a historic drop in carbon emissions.
I don't see how anyone can claim that Obama didn't do much here. CAFE standards, carbon restrictions, air quality standards, and more were instituted. His weakest areas were probably fracking and oil drilling and mostly that's a case of not going as far in reversing these activities as the green coalitions wanted him. And I don't really think of FDR and conservation unless one is talking about the CCC.
Medicare for All: Obama did not successfully institute single-payer health insurance for all Americans. But, then neither did New Deal Democrats Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson. What Obama did pull off, after all those previous Democrats proved unable to add health insurance to the welfare state, was a historic expansion in coverage, through a combination of Medicaid and new subsidized and regulated markets.
This is about the only complaint listed with any legitimacy at all. Obama declared that single payer "wouldn't work" in the US, which is way more than any of those predecessors did. He kept the advocates out of the process entirely. And he ultimately caved on the public option. And it was health insurance reform, not health care reform. Strangely, it probably helped fewer people than Medicare Part D, which all the democrats voted against. Alternately, it may have helped the MOST needy, as compared to Part D.
Progressive taxation: Obama cut taxes for the bottom income brackets and raised it for the top. The result was a direct transfer of income from top to bottom (see below).
This was a mixed bag. He cut taxes for the lowest household incomes, something for which he never got credit. He raised taxes on the highest incomes, something for which the right would never forgive him. He did leave in place the Bush tax cuts for folks in the upper middle class ($250K - 450?) for which many on the left wouldn't forgive.
Corporate regulation: Obama passed the Dodd-Frank reforms, the first major curtailment of the financial industry since Roosevelt’s time. His administration created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rolled back private control of college loans, created net neutrality, cracked down on for-profit colleges, and beefed up workplace safety regulation and enforcement, among other reforms.
Again, I think he's mostly right here. Dodd-Frank really wasn't a return to FDR type reforms, but they were reforms. And he did crack down on the whole student loan fiasco. He isn't responsible for when congress made college loans exempt from bankruptcy.
I can't get to Glickman's Washington Post op-ed because it's behind a paywall. So I can't tell if these are all of Glickmans' points, or merely the ones Jonathan Chait chose to focus upon. I am suspicious because the lists tend to be longer than this. Strangely, when waxing nostalgic for FDR people tend to forget his militarization policies and his foreign policy, much of which Obama could be thought of as to the "left".
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