Barack Obama: A Good, Bad or Just Mediocre President?

Robert W. Merry

Politics, United States

The 2016 election—and history—provides clear methods to grade our current president's performance. How will he stack up?

If presidential elections are largely referendums on the White House incumbent or incumbent party, as I have argued in these spaces and in my most recent book, Where They Stand, then the man who will exercise the greatest impact on the outcome of next year’s general election is President Obama. If his second term is adjudged by the American people to have been successful, then Democrats likely will retain the White House; if not, they won’t.

Under this analytical thesis—which, I acknowledge, raises skepticism among some political scientists, political journalists and political professionals (but they’re wrong)—presidential elections don’t turn on frivolous matters such as candidate gaffes, clever slogans or negative ads. Rather, the electorate operates on a higher plane, sorting out the unimportant debris of campaigns and rendering decisions based mostly on more fundamental questions of national direction and the performance of the incumbent (or incumbent party). In other words, there is a collective judgment in the electorate that emerges at the end of campaigns and brings a certain logic to the process.

That logic turns on serious matters of governance—the state of the economy, the position of America in the world, the degree of presidential initiative, and the like. The most serious lapses that, in combination, bring down presidents or parties in power are these: a sputtering economy and lack of per capita income growth; lack of any serious and successful initiative in domestic affairs; lack of any serious accomplishment in foreign relations; a serious foreign affairs fiasco; serious scandal that reaches the upper levels of government; and sustained civic unrest that leads to blood in the streets.

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