I have been saying this for years, and now others are starting to agree, history will be very kind to President Barack Obama.

Courtesy of New York Magazine:  

The president’s infuriating serenity, his inclination to play Spock even when the country wants a Captain Kirk, makes him an unusual kind of leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust settles, he will be judged. For Obama, the long run has been a source of comfort from the outset. He has quoted King’s dictum about the arc of the moral universe eventually bending toward justice, and he has said that “at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” To his critics, Obama is unable to attend to the theatrical duties of his office because he lacks a bedrock emotional connection with America. It seems more likely that he is simply unwilling to: that he is conducting his presidency on the assumption that his place in historical memory will be defined by a tabulation of his successes minus his failures. And that tomorrow’s historians will be more rational and forgiving than today’s political commentators. 

It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama, who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters of his presidency. But if it isn’t, it will be for a highly ironic reason: Our historical memory tends to romance, too. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fatherly reassurance, a youthful Kennedy tossing footballs on the White House lawn, Reagan on horseback—the craving for emotional sustenance and satisfying drama runs deep. Though the parade of Obama’s Katrinas will all be (and mostly already have been) consigned to the forgotten afterlife of cable-news ephemera, it is not yet certain whether this president can bind his achievements into any heroic narrative. 

It is already clear that, whatever the source of the current disappointment with Obama, the explanation cannot be that he failed to achieve his stated goals. In his first inaugural address, Obama outlined a sweeping domestic agenda. The list of promises was specific: not only to rescue the economy from catastrophe but also to undertake sweeping long-term reforms in health care, education, energy, and financial regulation. 

At first, conservatives denounced this agenda as a virtual revolution. “An ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime,” cried the columnist Charles Krauthammer. It “would permanently refashion the role of the federal government in the lives of every American,” warned Jennifer Rubin. Conservatives have since changed their line, and now portray the president as a Carter-esque mediocrity—a “parenthesis in American political history” (Krauthammer) “with no significant accomplishment” (Rubin). But this is not because Obama failed to accomplish the goals he set out. On the contrary, he has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of them. The horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize.

There's more, a lot more, but the gist is that despite attempts by conservatives to undermine this president and render him impotent, he has in fact accomplished amazing things during his presidency.

And that will be made crystal clear in the years to come after he leaves office, and after historians have an opportunity to examine the nuts and bolts of his legacy.