This seems to be the season for centrist Obama-bashing. He’s ineffectual, we’re told, a drag on his party, Democrats are complaining (although none on the record), and so on.

By any objective standard, this is very strange. Obama’s signature initiative, health reform, made a stunning comeback from a rocky start and will almost surely be irreversible by the time he leaves office. He’s taken the most important step on environmental policy since the Clean Air Act. Financial reform is less sweeping and well short of what should have happened, but it’s still significant. If the point of being president is to do things with lasting effect, Obama has delivered. So why the bashing?

Part of the answer, I think, is that these are the wrong achievements. He was supposed to be serious in the approved way, slashing entitlements to deal with the fiscal crisis. The fact that there wasn’t actually a fiscal crisis, and that anyone who really cares about the long run should worry a lot more about carbon emissions than about the Medicare age, doesn’t change the bias; strong presidents are supposed to use that strength on behalf of the elite’s pet obsessions, not other stuff.

Another part of the answer is that Obama does, indeed, have a weak approval rating. But as Jonathan Chait points out, he had a weak rating going into the 2012 campaign too; what mattered was that while voters weren’t enthralled with him, elections are zero-sum, and voters really disliked the Republican agenda.

Actually, I suspect that we won’t see a president with sky-high ratings for a long time, no matter how successful he or she is. America is bitterly polarized, and Republicans in particular will despise any Democrat no matter how much peace and prosperity he or she brings. But a Democrat who has the approval of 40 percent of voters and can attract another 12 or 13 percent who dislike her but dislike Republicans even more can win big, and that’s the likely shape of the future.

Long-time readers know that I was highly critical of Obama back when many were swooning. And I wish that he and his circle had done more on a number of fronts in 2009-2010. But right now he’s doing what presidents are supposed to do: change the country significantly for the better.