President Barack Obama would likely be the first to admit that his administration’s response to the first case of Ebola in the United States was not perfect. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not have adequate protocols in place, and two Dallas nurses caught the virus as a result. One of the nurses who contracted Ebola even received approval from the CDC to travel on Frontier Airlines, despite having a slight fever.

These errors have lent themselves to the narrative that Obama has mishandled the crisis. The most prominent example comes from Joshua Green in Bloomberg Businessweek. “It didn’t require extraordinary foresight to anticipate the public freakout once the infection spread beyond [Thomas Eric] Duncan,” Green wrote. “The crisis required more of [Obama] than he seemed to recognize. But he was hampered by the same things that have plagued him all along: a liberal technocrat’s excess of faith in government’s ability to solve problems and an unwillingness or inability to demonstrate the forcefulness Americans expect of their president in an emergency.”

Green’s article criticizes Obama’s entire style of crisis management. (The piece is titled, “Obama Is Too Cool for Crisis Management.”) The White House has faced this critique frequently over the past year, from both the left and right, as it has rushed from one crisis to the next. Yet collectively, Obama’s responses to these numerous crises—from the scandal at Veteran Affairs hospital and the border crisis to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and most recently the Ebola outbreak—has been largely successful so far. The insatiable news media just hasn’t noticed.

You can break the crises Obama has faced over the past six months into three broad categories. The first are ones where he has had almost no ability to immediately fix the underlying problems. Think of the secret waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs, civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown, and Israel’s war in Gaza. The issues at the VA were decades in the making and require significant reforms within the department. In Ferguson, the issue fell under the jurisdiction of state and local authorities—and was a product of racial and political tensions. And the Israeli-Palestinian war was almost entirely outside the administration’s control.

The second category includes crises where the president had limited tools at his disposal, such as the conflict in Ukraine and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In both situations, the administration’s response was too slow, but has proven effective given limited options. The U.S. was not going to go to war with Russia, for instance, so Obama worked with the European Union to impose harsh sanctions on the Kremlin while seeking a diplomatic solution. That strategy seems to be working. The ceasefire between the Ukrainian government and rebel forces has so far held. It’s not a perfect solution, but faced with a hostile Russia, it’s a pretty good result. In fact, Ukrainian parliamentary elections this past weekend boded well for the country.