To be honest I think Pelosi had the biggest influence. She related to Biden on a personal level, knew him the longest, always treated him with respect, and voluntarily stepped down from her role as speaker, herself. Being older carries some clout, too.
Obama had the lowest number of civilian deaths since President Carter and was far lower than Trump that followed him. Republicans had to invent a new metric to find something bad to say about Obama. Since he wasn't killing thousands of people like Bush, they invented the metric of drone strikes to make him seem worse than Bush.
Funny you say that because it's his administration that redefined what combatant is to include any young man or boy as an enemy combatant. That way he could claim he wasn't killing civilians he was killing enemy comments.
Hope is worth nothing in hindsight. Obama was a shit ass president - still way better than trump. He allowed privacy to be demolished and bombed the shit out of everyone.
He didn’t “bomb the shit out of everyone” any more than his predecessor or successor, on average. The only difference is that he made the bombing statistics transparent, whereas the others hid those numbers.