So now we have the last jobs report before voters pick President Barack Obama’s successor on Tuesday, and it’s not a bad one: 161,000 new jobs, a 4.9% unemployment rate and wages up 2.8% in the past year.

Soon Obama’s presidency will belong to the ages. When it comes to the economy, what will historians see?

The short-term answer, like Obama’s 52% approval rating, is pretty good, and improving. The long-term answer is likely to be much better, because Obama has attacked so many structural problems of the economy he inherited in such a thoughtful way, working toward a horizon of decades, eschewing the “win the week” mentality of D.C. doofuses on both sides of the aisle, and not least in the media.

Put another way: The hopey-changey stuff is working just fine, Gov. Palin, and its wisdom will be borne out by on Tuesday. The average guess of four poll-analytics groups is an 87% chance than Democrats will keep the White House with the election of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

Electoral validation matters, but Obama has always played a longer game.

As time runs short, Obama urges voters to 'choose hope'

First, the numbers: The jobs created in October stack up nicely next to the 473,000 lost in October 2008, the last time we could have had this chat about an outgoing President (not to mention the 2.26 million more that would evaporate before Obama took the oath of office). That’s just one measure of how the president walked into an avalanche not of his own making.

Since the economy hit bottom in February 2010, private-sector job growth has been 15.5 million, or 14%. From the first jobs report on Obama’s watch, covering February 2009, it’s 11.95 million, with three reports left. How good is that?

Look at this table of private-sector employment growth:

President Total of new jobs Gain from trough Percent gain from trough Reagan 14.7 million 16.6 million 22.8% George H.W. Bush 1.5 million n/a 1.7% Bill Clinton 21.0 million n/a 23.1% George W. Bush -396,000 -4.6 million -3.9%

So, he’s better than both Bushes, comparable to Reagan, and not as good as Clinton. In each case, what a president inherited tells you a lot. That helped Clinton and probably Reagan, and forced Obama into the long, slow expansion we’ve seen since 2009, which is likely to last for a few years yet.

But it’s the long-run thinking where Obama has shined.

Of the economy’s long-run issues in 2009, at least three stand out — and he has made a big dent in all of them. On energy, health care, even wealth inequality, he has made decisive change or begun it.

On energy, he exemplifies the belt-and-suspenders plan both sides talk about, but neither party had really done before. He defied the left wing of his party and stayed out of the way of the fracking revolution that crashed oil prices in a lasting way — making America all but energy independent. At the same time, he tripled use of wind and solar power, financed several of the factories that have made electric cars viable, and his Clean Power Plan will phase out much coal use in favor of cleaner, now-cheaper alternatives, helping slow or forestall climate change.

A future where electric cars are powered by clean, mostly renewable electricity is now clearly within reach, and it’s Obama’s doing. That means lower costs for consumers and business, and global leverage for presidents who don’t see Vladimir Putin as a misunderstood rebel Daddy just can’t understand, like Trump’s bizarro-Bobbysoxer view of the once-and-forever KGB thug.

Read:How to buy a $35,000 brand-new electric car for under $14,000

On health care, Obamacare has already cut the uninsured rate in half, to the lowest level ever, while contributing to historically low cost growth far outlasting the recession. That reduced both a major source of inequality and a big inefficiency for American business. Obamacare needs fixes, but nothing a functioning Congress can’t handle. The D.C. crowd that still says Obama should’ve ignored health care to press a second stimulus package in 2010 looks silly now (D.C. by 2011 was all-in for austerity, remember?). They’ll look sillier as near-universal health care becomes entrenched and details of 2010’s economy fade from memory.

Read:5 things you think you know about Obamacare that are flat-out wrong

Finally, on inequality, Obama has restored all but 1% of the median household incomes lost since they peaked in the first days of W’s administration. They’ll go higher under the second President Clinton. At the same time, the taxation needed to pay for Obamacare and the modest tax hikes in the 2013 fiscal cliff deal has restored the percentage of taxes paid by the wealthiest to pre-Reagan levels, while maintaining the smaller profile of government as a percentage of the economy begun in the 1980s. It’s a slightly smaller burden, more equitably shared.

Read:How economic inequality found a political voice

In 20 years, all will be seen as accomplishments that are, to coin a phrase, yooge. Whether today’s jobs number beat expectations or not.