Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Barack Obama is not a modest man, but when it comes to assessing his or any president’s place in the long American story, he has been heard to say, “We just try to get our paragraph right.” Yet the way a raft of recent events have broken sharply in his favor, Obama suddenly seems well on his way to writing a whole page—or at least a big, fat passage—in the history books.

From the Supreme Court decisions upholding his signature health care plan and the right of gay Americans to marry, to contested passage of fast track trade authority, the opening of normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and an international agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Obama is on a policy and political roll that would have seem unimaginable to many in Washington only a few months ago.


“Obama may be singular as a president, not only because of his striking background,” says Kenneth Adelman, who was Ronald Reagan’s arms control negotiator with the Soviets three decades ago, and who has his doubts about the Iran deal. “It may turn out that unlike virtually any other president, his second term is actually better than his first.”

Rallying his cabinet in January in the wake of the Democratic Party’s decisive defeat in last fall’s midterm elections, Obama himself maintained, “Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.” This president has always been something of a clutch player, but his command of recent events—from his soaring eulogy for the victims of the Charleston church massacre, to his commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminal offenders than any president since Franklin Roosevelt—goes a good way toward proving the prescience of his words.

For much of the last five years, it had seemed Obama’s peculiar misfortune that the biggest achievement of his time in office—the adoption of his health care plan—might also prove his biggest defeat, because of the bitter and unyielding political and legal backlash unleashed by its narrow passage on a strict partisan vote.

Simultaneously, Obama’s ability to take decisive unilateral action on foreign policy—often a source of succor and satisfaction to second-term presidents—seemed highly limited, if only because he remained saddled with the ugly aftermath of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the ISIL threat.

Not so long ago, much of the chattering class was reading the last rites over the Obama administration, and turning to the 2016 election as a test of whether anything would be left of the president’s legacy if a Republican succeeded him. That’s still an open question, of course. But the Court’s recent rulings and Obama’s own seemingly unplugged and swing-for-the-fences attitude on questions from race to criminal justice has given his presidency a sharply re-invigorated viability and relevance.

“It’s an unfinished chapter,” says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who is writing a new biography of Gerald Ford. “But he has already defied the second-term curse and the wisdom of just six months ago. ‘What can a president do if he doesn’t have either house of Congress?’ Well, guess what, he can reverse a 50, 60-year-old policy toward Cuba. But, more than that, he can still, even without the traditional televised Oval Office version of the bully pulpit, to a large degree set the terms of the national debate.”

The president’s very demeanor in his White House news conference on Thursday bespoke a renewed intensity and determination to make the most of the time he has left. Much of the time, he fielded questions in a relaxed posture, leaning on the lectern with one elbow, but some of his answers were emphatic bordering on brusque. As the session wound down, he canvassed the East Room for more questions about the Iran agreement with a kind of “Hit-me-with-your-best-shot” bravado, as if to show how important he believes it to be. With a blithe air that belied the seriousness of the issue, he quoted that noted diplomat Ricky Ricardo to say that if Iran mined more uranium than it was supposed to, “They got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

“It is a measure of the times in which we live that we start the legacy discussion a year and a half before the end of a presidency,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s former longtime strategist. “But he’s had the most productive period he’s enjoyed since the first two years: Cuba, the climate agreement with China, action on immigration, fast track on trade, the SCOTUS decisions on health care and marriage and now this agreement on Iran. These are big, historically significant developments, in most cases the culmination of years of commitment on his part.”

Obama himself said he hoped Congress would debate the Iran agreement on the facts and the merits, but added, “We live in Washington and politics do intrude.” The sharp and instantaneous denunciation of the president’s comments by Republicans was a sure sign of the parallel universes that constitute American politics these days. Former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that Obama was a “very, very naïve man,” who “cannot put the dots together,” while Glenn Beck’s daily email newsletter subject line was, “Obama continues to destroy the country.”

The Republicans are not the only obstacle that Obama faces. He won his fast track Asian trade authority with largely Republican support, and the Iran agreement has stirred significant Democratic skepticism, among even the party’s leaders in Congress. If the Greek financial crisis engulfs Europe and spreads to Wall Street, there is no telling what the American economy might look like when Obama leaves office in 18 months.

By definition, the success or failure of the Iran agreement will not be known until long after Obama has left office, and critics like Adelman worry that even if Iran cheats on its obligations, international sanctions will never be re-imposed, because violations will be so hard to prove and the global investment in Iran will be so entrenched that it cannot be unwound.

But time and again, Obama has proven himself patient and willing to play what he likes to call the long game, or what Axelrod summed up as “the determination to resist small, incremental politics to do big, transformational things.”

The president’s former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, notes that almost all of Obama’s recent successes had their origins in things he said and did long ago, including his insistence in a 2007 primary debate that it was worth talking even to enemies (an assertion that many commentators saw as a gaffe at the time) and his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race (which he made over the nervous objections of some of his advisers).

“This is the long game paying off,” Favreau says. “Most critically, he understood that change on all of these issues would come at a slower and more gradual pace than the perpetual hysterics in Washington would demand. When it came time to actually govern, he put the history books ahead of the news cycles, and our politics will be better off if future presidents follow his example—because the thousands of words written since the midterms about how resigned and defeated Obama is now seem as insightful as the comments section of a blog.”

For all the travails that second terms bring—and for the inevitable fatigue the public tends to have for any president after eight years—there are also achievements that come with the experienced gained in office. Ronald Reagan’s second term was nearly undone by the Iran-Contra scandal, but then burnished by his role in helping to end the Cold War. Bill Clinton was brought low by impeachment, but he also helped broker peace in Northern Ireland and led the calls for NATO bombing to stop Serbian attacks in Bosnia and Kosovo that redeemed his first-term reticence to intervene there.

Obama himself has often suggested—as he did again this week—that he aspired to do more than mark time, and instead intended to conduct a transformative presidency akin to Ronald Reagan’s, which moved the needle of public sentiment in decisive and lasting ways about the proper role of government at home and the capacity for co-existence with the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union abroad.

Historian Smith, while cautioning that no reliable assessment of Obama’s legacy could be made until decades from now, suggested that there was nevertheless “emerging evidence that Obama may be pulling off on the left what Reagan did on the right.”

“That is to say,” Smith says, “certainly, if you look at the cultural politics, there is no doubt America is to the left of where it was when Obama took office.” Smith noted that recent polling had found a sharp narrowing in the gap between the percentage of Americans who consider themselves conservative and those who identify as liberal, together with the reality that Obama has the country’s changing demographics and attitudes on issues like gay marriage on his side.

But he added: “If Obama moves the center of political gravity, as well as the center of cultural gravity—which might have moved without him, let’s face it—but if he can move the center of political gravity several degrees to the left—we’ve been waiting for a post-New Deal liberalism for a long time—Jimmy Carter saw the need for it, Bill Clinton gave us a first draft—then he will be a transformative president, because he will have transformed the political consensus.”

The very intensity with which Obama’s opponents rail against his policies—and what most mainstream commentators hail as his successes—suggests that Smith may be onto something. Republicans themselves have acknowledged, for example, that their dogged efforts to defeat his health care bill, or cripple it from birth, were based on the certainty that once the program’s most popular policies (such as no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions) were in place, it would be effectively impossible to repeal Obamacare.

The effect of outside events on Obama’s remaining time in office is impossible to predict. But there are clues in the president’s own words about the issues he might choose to emphasize, including overhauling the criminal justice system, which he said on Wednesday was “part of the broader set of challenges that we face in creating a more perfect union.”

In the wake not only of the Charleston shootings but other instances of police violence against blacks, Obama has also shown himself notably more willing to talk out loud about the enduring complexities and unfinished business of race in American life. Three years ago, the president touched off considerable controversy—and no little praise—in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, when he declared in the White House Rose Garden, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Today, if anything, he speaks even more freely, as he contemplates what might have been in his own life, and what he might yet do as president. “There but for the grace of God,” he said on Thursday, after becoming the first sitting president to visit a federal penitentiary, in El Reno, Oklahoma—just days after his mass commutation of sentences for non-violent offenders.

If the clock on his time in office is winding down, Obama—a reserve shooting guard on his high school’s state championship basketball team whose playground style never quite meshed with his coach’s by-the-book ethos—seems even more determined to run up the score.

“I think he feels, ‘The clock is ticking, and why don’t I go for things?’” Adelman says. “’I’m never going to really move the Republicans. I’m never going to move the Democrats on issues like free trade.’ And many times that may have moved him to the edge—or even over the edge—of his legal authority. But he’s trying.”