On Thursday evening, President Obama delivered a speech at Cross Campus in Santa Monica, California promoting his economic policies targeted at millennials. It follows a broader speech that the president gave at Northwestern a week ago, when he touted the significant progress the economy has made during his presidency. “It is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office,” he told the crowd in Chicago. “By every economic measure, we are better off now than we were when I took office.”

No one would argue with that statement, but it’s a very low bar. [Update: As Binyamin Appelbaum points out on Twitter, not every economic measure has improved, particularly labor force participation as I talk about below. But the economy is still certainly improved since 2009.] After all, when Obama took office, the economy was in the midst of the worst recession in 80 years. And while the economy has certainly recovered, large numbers of Americans aren’t feeling it—a point that Obama himself is the first to admit. “Our broader economy in the aggregate has come a long way, but the gains of recovery are not yet broadly shared—or at least not broadly shared enough,” Obama also said last week.

This is the challenge that the White House faces when trying to communicate the successes of Obama’s economic platform: Acknowledging what hasn’t been done, even as it tries to boast about what has been done. It’s a difficult, maybe even impossible job. But political difficulty shouldn’t be mistaken for policy failure. The truth is that, given the severity of the Great Recession and unprecedented Republican obstruction, Obama’s economic policies have been a success.

The most consequential economic policy of Obama’s presidency was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—a.k.a., the stimulus. Right-wingers deride it, but economists widely agree—92 percent of them, according to a Chicago Booth poll—that the unemployment rate was lower in 2010 than it would have been absent the stimulus. As Paul Krugman has argued (ad nauseam) over the past few years, this made sense based on traditional economic theory. When the financial crisis hit, Americans cut back on their spending, forcing businesses to fire employees, who then cut back on their own spending. As this process repeated itself, it created a “hole” in demand. The stimulus was designed to fill that hole. It wasn’t big enough, but that really wasn’t Obama’s fault. As Mike Grunwald, the man who wrote the book on the stimulus, has written, Obama faced political opposition in Congress to pass any stimulus larger than $800 billion. He did the best he could.

For many Americans, it’s hard to imagine that the stimulus worked. The unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent and real wages have been stagnant even as unemployment came back down. When Obama touts the current 5.9 percent jobless rate, many financial analysts roll their eyes. Yes, the unemployment rate has fallen, they note, but labor force participation is also at its lowest point since the late 1970s. A falling unemployment rate is not good if it’s the result of workers dropping out of the labor market. But not everybody who’s decied to stop looking for work has done so for the same reason. Some of them are baby boomers who are retiring, some are millennials who have gone back to school, while others really are prime-aged workers too discouraged to search for work. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have found work. When Obama says “our businesses have created 10 million new jobs,” it’s a legitimate testament to how far we’ve come.