i've explained this before, so i'll just do it briefly here as the transition approaches.

was obama a good president or a bad president? what is his legacy? they get you in the frame, and you need to answer. you don't think he was that bad, so you say good.

i propose neither. that he was inconsequential. and that he'll end up smack dab in the middle of the "nobody remembers" pile.

he has produced no independent foreign policy; he just carried on with bush'. he has produced no meaningful domestic policy that will outlive him. he just held the office for a few years. the correct term for this is caretaker president.

but, here's another thought: this may be a characteristic of this period of late capitalism that we may be exiting. i'd say the same thing about stephen harper and david cameron and angela merkel. that's what we've had over the last ten years: these bureaucratic "moderate conservatives" that have just held to power without using it.

that's changing. i don't want to give trump a chance: he will be a bad president, i think that is obvious, although good or bad is obviously subjective and we may look at the same policy and come to different conclusions. history also has somewhat of a lorentz factor to consider; the chinese have famously claimed that it's still too soon to analyze the outcome of the french revolution. but, there are changes happening in britain, too. as well as in canada.

we don't know what follows "late capitalism". marx & hegel were wrong: history does not unfold in a final cause. it could be a return to feudalism. we could be entering a period of civil war.

but, this is obama's legacy - he's a footnote to history in an era that is a footnote to history.