Must-read: Dylan Matthews: Barack Obama: One of the Most Consequential Presidents

Must-Read: Dylan Matthews: Barack Obama: One of the Most Consequential Presidents: “You can celebrate or bemoan these accomplishments…

…But no one can deny that the changes Obama has wrought are enormous in scale. Obamacare: a big ** deal…. National health insurance has been the single defining goal of American progressivism for more than a century… ever since its inclusion in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose platform…. It was the big gap between our welfare state and those of our peers in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. And for more than a century, efforts to achieve national health insurance failed…. Then on March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act….

When you consider the law in the context of 100 years of progressive activism, and in the grand scheme of American history, it starts to look less like a moderate reform and more like an epochal achievement, on the order of FDR’s passage of Social Security or LBJ’s Great Society programs….

The Affordable Care Act was hardly Obama’s only accomplishment. He passed a stimulus bill… Dodd-Frank Act…. executive action to… curb greenhouse gas emissions… protect nearly 6 million undocumented immigrants from deportation… ended the ban on gay and lesbian service… made it easier for women and minorities to fight wage discrimination, cut out wasteful private sector involvement in student loans… hiked the top income tax rate… reprofessionalized the Department of Justice….

There are obviously places Obama fell short…. Monetary policy… combating HIV/AIDS and other public health scourges abroad… deport[ing] millions of unauthorized immigrants… perpetrators of torture and other war crimes from the Bush administration should have been criminally prosecuted. But… it could never be said that he accomplished little…. And on foreign issues, Obama’s record is perhaps the most successful of any Democratic president since Truman. He has reestablished productive diplomacy as the central task of a progressive foreign policy….

You can generally divide American presidents into… [the] ultimately forgettable … and the hugely consequential for good or ill (FDR, Lincoln, Nixon, Andrew Johnson). Whether you love or hate his record, there’s no question Obama’s domestic and foreign achievements place him firmly in the latter camp.