How much will Obama’s being black matter in the end? In, say, 20 years, will it be a major or minor aspect of his presidency and, to the extent that it will matter, in what specific way will it matter most?

In 20 years, the heated discussions we are so familiar with over whether Obama’s presidency has been hampered by his color will seem distinctly quaint. Smart undergrads, now being born, will have to work to understand�despite that America even then will be far from �post-racial��why we think Obama’s color has much to do with how we rate his accomplishments in office. At least the smartest ones will read how furious the opposition to Bill Clinton was from the same kind of crowd who later bedeviled Obama.

But apprised formally of the ’90s political scene, in which Ken Starr will figure as a kind of mesmerizing Ahab, the student in 2034 will see that icky moments like Joe Wilson’s �You lie!� eruption were counterbalanced by the fact that the president that jape was aimed at was elected twice. Obama will be rated as having scored big with Obamacare despite the opposition. The idea that some people such as Tavis Smiley and Cornel West thought he was at fault in not being a �black-identified� president will seem retrograde in a country where Latinos and recent immigrants of endless origins share space with the old-time black-white dyad and when a race-neutral concept of class will be normed in a way that is already growing apace now.

Will the Obama years come to be seen as a major realignment in Democratic politics? As a historian, how would you predict the longevity of his coalition?

Obama will not be seen as having created the new bipartisan alignment we hoped for in 2008, but it will be clearer in 20 years that this has much to do with technology. Social media and the internet have allowed the hard right to focus their message in a way that would have been impossible in what will seem more obviously an �antique� time before the web. We today do not perceive this as vividly as we might, because those of us over about 40 do not live 24/7 online/cloud as deeply as those younger than us. No 20-something Reddit fan wonders why a smart, professorial black Adlai Stevenson such as Obama hasn’t been able to marginalize mean right-wingers; they would only wonder why anyone would expect, given the ready platform any bozo has, such a thing. Partisanship is the permanent norm now.

What single action could Obama realistically do before the end of his term that would make the biggest positive difference to his historical legacy?

If Obama made a major push to end the War on Drugs beyond just making it easier for people to smoke pot, he would automatically qualify as having saved black America, which suffers disproportionately from the effects of the New Prohibition. That, in terms of what people have hoped from him, would be one for the books.