http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/life-got-better-under-obama-according-to-gallup.html 2016-09-07 19:21:00 Life Got Better Under Obama, According to Gallup More Americans say they are enjoying a higher standard of living, exercising more and generally thriving, though fewer report being in excellent health. === In the years since The rates of That’s all according to The analysis represents an attempt at understanding how American well-being has changed during the Obama presidency. Generally, people reported their lives had improved even though they gave poorer assessments of their health. “If you stick strictly to physical well-being, it’s a real mixed picture, and I think probably more negative than it is positive,” said Dan Witters, research director of the nearly decade-long effort, which has a mouthful of a name: the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. “If you broaden it, though, and look at things like declining uninsured rates, declining food insecurity, improving life evaluation, improving perspective on standard of living, those things are all trending up,” he added. It is, of course, hard to credit or blame presidents with every change that occurrs during a presidency. Many large forces are simply out of their control. Nonetheless, it is hard to find one individual who has more power to shape American life than a president. The analyses, published throughout last week, therefore offer some insight, fair or not, into how Mr. Obama may be judged. Here’s a brief look at what Gallup found. When Mr. Obama was elected in late 2008, the nation was in the middle of a historic recession, and Americans were divided on what the future would hold. That year, just 42 percent of those But as the economy improved, so, too, did attitudes. By the first seven months of this year, the share of Americans who felt their standard of living was improving rose to 62 percent. Only 22 percent said it was getting worse. It wasn’t just attitudes about the future that improved; appraisals of life in the moment brightened, too. The share of Americans who said they were satisfied with their current standard of living — all the things they can buy and do — rose from 73 percent to 80 percent over those years. The ratings improved regardless of income level, with the improvement most dramatic for non-Hispanic black Americans, followed by Hispanics and then non-Hispanic whites. Gallup largley credits the across-the-board improvement to the fact that the economy, and attitudes, had nowhere else to go. “The increase in perceived standard of living over the past seven-plus years reflects in large part the low starting point when Obama took office during the aftermath of a crippling recession,” Gallup notes. Using the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the two organizations Those who rated themselves closest to that ideal were deemed to be “thriving,” with the share that qualified as such rising from 48.9 percent in 2008, the year before Mr. Obama took office, to 55.4 percent today. In the short-term, ratings appear to have been affected by ideology and race. Life evaluations during Mr. Obama’s first term rose for blacks, especially Democrats, and declined for white Republicans. “There’s pretty good evidence that both race and political identity had kind of a short-term impact on how people were thinking about and evaluating their lives,” Mr. Witters said. During the president’s second term, however, the inverse was true: life ratings declined some for blacks and improved for whites, driven, Mr. Witters said, by the economic rebound. The success of one of Mr. Obama’s landmark achievements, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, rests largely on whether it improves the accessibility, affordability and quality of health care. On those measures, the results so far are mixed, Gallup found. Accessibility At the same time, a smaller share of Americans than at any point in Mr. Obama’s presidency report having had trouble paying for their family’s health care or medicines. Nonetheless, Americans are still about The share who describe their health as “excellent” fell from 22.6 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2016, according to the surveys conducted for the well-being index. Ratings dropped among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and all age groups, except those aged 65 and older, whose ratings of “excellent” health increased slightly. That decline is supported by some other measures. Obesity To the nation’s credit, The Gallup analyses drew from multiple polls based on anywhere from hundreds of thousands to more than 2 million telephone interviews.