…Obama faces trash talk left, right and center — literally — and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. […]This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a big deal.
My friends at the Washington Monthly recently published a list of Obama’s top accomplishments and it’s a pretty extraordinary inventory of one of the most successful presidents of modern times. Rachel had a related segment last night, and watching the list of historic breakthroughs, it’s hard not to notice that Obama exits the stage as the most accomplished president, of either party, since FDR.The political world often has a short memory, but when Obama took office, the crises seemed overwhelming. A global economic crash had sent the economy into free fall. The nation was mired in two costly wars. The domestic auto industry was on the verge of collapse. America’s international standing was in the trash. Much of the country felt hopeless and desperate.Eight years later, the Democrat leaves the White House as the leader who rescued the economy, brought health security to tens of millions, saved the auto industry, imposed new safeguards and layers of accountability on Wall Street, expanded civil rights, brought U.S. troops home, brought justice to Osama bin Laden while preventing major terrorist attacks, and scored major foreign-policy victories in Iran and Cuba — to name just a few of Obama’s more notable accomplishments.He did all of this without any scandals and while facing unprecedented obstructionism from a radicalized Republican Party.In June 2015, Obama told the New Yorker‘s David Remnick, “[A]t the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” After eight years, it appears his paragraph has few modern rivals.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."