With the caveat that his administration is not yet finished, and two years is a long time, how will history judge Obama?

The first six years of Obama’s presidency provide a sound basis for regarding him as a figure of considerably greater historical significance than is recognized in the prevailing discourse of talking heads. Historians are much more conscious than lots of other folks seem to be of one huge reality: the power of inherited constraints on what a particular president can do under the specific circumstances he or she may face. It is a terrible mistake to treat as ideologically biased those pro-Obama assessments which emphasize how confining Obama’s inheritance is from the Bush years, especially in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan. Contemporary political discussions usually deny the power of the past, claim that any president who has been in office for a while �owns� whatever dilemmas he has somehow failed to solve to popular satisfaction, and drain empirical reality out of the claims and counterclaims offered every second on cable TV. (�It’s all politics� too many folks say; that’s not true.)

That said, the chief shortcoming of Obama’s first six years may turn out to be his failure to mobilize one formidable resource at his disposal: the record of the federal government as an agent of the public interest. He seems to have held back from this because of an accurate assessment of the leadership of the Democratic Party, which has shown itself afraid to defend �big government,� and therefore unwilling to support him. This goes all the way back to the stimulus, which Obama rightly understood should have been much larger. While it is demonstrably true that very few of the Democrats in the House and the Senate have been willing to defend the tradition that made them and that promised a strong future, the big question historians are likely to debate in future years is whether Obama could have brought these Democrats around on this issue had he pressed them more vigorously than he did. Within this uncertainly, the Affordable Care Act looks like a great triumph for the traditions of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society, the very tradition of a strong federal state that the Democrats have been so reluctant to vindicate and further advance.

Will future historians blame Obama for not getting more done in a climate of Republican obstructionism, or will he be given a pass for it? More generally, to what degree will his presidency be seen as �transformative� (the word he used to describe the Reagan administration)?

It is unlikely that future historians will have any trouble recognizing the obstructionist program of the Republican Party as a historically special episode, and a constraint on Obama’s presidency almost as formidable as the legacy of George W. Bush’s decisions to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, too, our political discourse invites us to treat as �mere politics� the assertion that the Republicans are behaving in radically different ways from either party in the relevant past. But what has been happening is simply not normal. This is an empirical fact. The tendency of journalists to drain the truth-value out of every claim and counterclaim makes it all the more important that historians speak up.