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

Much is to be said of the Obama administration’s economic policies. But for me, the Affordable Care Act’s progressivism stands out as the embodiment of President Obama’s best intentions. Some 3 million poor people have gained access to health care thanks to the extension of Medicaid. But those people will not be in deep-southern states where poor people are numerous but Republicans rule. I see this convergence as a consequence of watermelon politics, as unsavory a legacy of Obama’s time as Obamacare is fine. While pundits struggle to explain the disaccord between Obamacare’s benefits for poor Americans and poor southern Americans’ professed loathing, I look at our history and ask experts to connect the dots between disrespect, insult, and the resurgence of watermelon jokes. A president who is black has driven some Americans�in and out of politics�crazy. In a very mean way, the craziness has expressed itself in a felt need to put him and other educated or powerful African-Americans back in their place, often through the use of the watermelon joke. In country bars and the National Book Awards, watermelon jokes work to restore the white-supremacist status quo ante. The history of racial restoration is not well known beyond historians of the South. We southern historians recognize it in �Redemption� after Reconstruction, in campaigns against Virginia Readjusters in the 1880s, against Populists and Fusionists in North Carolina in the 1890s, against black businesses in Tulsa in 1921. President Obama’s power stirred up resistance against him as a representation of racial change with Republican opposition to Obamacare only one prime example in a history longer than most Americans realize. You can see today’s watermelon jokes as part of a broader yearning for racial restoration.

What will be the most lasting image of the Obama presidency?

Watermelons.