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These days many Americans live in an alternative political reality, in which the simplest factual assertions are met with anger and derision. When I, like many others, noted that job growth since Obamacare went into full effect has been the fastest since the 1990s — which is simply what the BLS data say — I got a barrage of mail from people claiming that I’m crazy, a liar, etc.. Similarly, but on of course a much bigger scale, a lot of what I’m seeing in reactions to the State of the Union amounts to the assertion that only an imbecile or a hack could believe Obama’s talk about the strength of the U.S. economy relative to other advanced countries — when that’s a simple fact.

But that involves grading on a curve, one where the average is dragged down by the awful performance of Europe. What does the economic record look like compared with our own past?

Not great, but not too bad.

Unemployment is, of course, more or less back to pre-crisis levels, but that’s in part due to falling labor force participation. So what’s happening to family incomes? Unfortunately, the Census data on those incomes come with a long lag, but Sentier Research now produces much more timely estimates (using the CPS data), which are shown above. What they say is that after a severe drop, median real household income is also roughly back to pre-crisis levels.

That’s not a great result; once upon a time we expected median income to be markedly higher at each business cycle peak than it was at the preceding peak. But that wasn’t true under Bush, who also only more or less presided over a return to the previous peak on the eve of the Great Recession — and the Bush-era economy only got there thanks to a disastrous housing bubble. (As an aside: median income didn’t rise much under Reagan either.)

So the Obama macroeconomic record isn’t just one of stabilizing the economy after a terrifying crisis; he has also presided over overall income growth that, assuming we don’t have another recession this year, will have been better than his predecessor.

And meanwhile we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the number of uninsured Americans, so while income has been flat, income security is up substantially.

Of course, none of this will make any dent on the conviction of the usual suspects that everything has been a disaster. But really, Obama has cause for satisfaction though not triumph.