David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.

For weeks now, the impending departure of Barack Obama from the White House has inspired a run of paeans to his greatness, a flood of laments about how much he’ll be missed. Everywhere there are bouquets to his classy family, tributes to his avoidance of scandal, toasts to his decency, appreciations of his dry wit. Even his reading habits are cause for celebration: “Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped—in his life, convictions and outlook on the world—by reading and writing as Barack Obama,” wrote the book critic Michiko Kakutani in a front-page New York Times story. (Really? More than Theodore Roosevelt, who read a book a day and wrote more than 30 himself? Or Woodrow Wilson, our only Ph.D. president and one of the leading political scientists of his era?)

If it’s not Obama’s dignified, cerebral style being venerated, it’s a laundry list of his hard-won achievements, many of them undeniably important: the Recovery Act, the auto bailout, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, killing bin Laden, the Cuba opening, the Paris climate accord—you can fill in the rest. Impressive as this litany is, though, it hardly adds up to the best presidency since Franklin Roosevelt’s; you can make lists just as long for a lot of other presidents, too. Nor does the record rise to the status of “transformational,” to use the word that has hovered over his two terms in office. Obama has undoubtedly been a very good president, and in some ways an excellent one, but he hasn’t fundamentally changed the country in the manner of FDR or LBJ or Ronald Reagan or even, arguably, Bill Clinton, who restored confidence in liberal governance so that crime, welfare, fiscal responsibility and national security were no longer millstones for democrats.


Like American exceptionalism, neoliberalism and fake news, the phrase “transformational leadership” is as widely used as it is ill understood. It was popularized by the political scientist James MacGregor Burns, who explained it as leadership that addresses and shapes the morale and values of the people being led. In contrast to “transactional” leaders, who serve their constituents’ interests as best they can in exchange for political support (and leave the constituents essentially unchanged), transformational leaders bring their constituents aboard a moral or spiritual project, revising in some fundamental sense who they are. Transformational presidents change the country, but they do so by changing our underlying attitudes and commitments.

For obvious reasons, the term became associated with Obama during his 2008 presidential bid. With inspirational, high-flown rhetoric, he vowed to change the culture of Washington and deliver Americans to a brighter day. At times the oratory waxed messianic. Future generations would look back, he rhapsodized, and say that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

Above all, Obama’s transformational promise rested on the thrilling prospect of our reaching a long-sought turning point in our troubled racial history. After centuries of upholding slavery and racial discrimination, Americans finally seemed ready to choose a man of African ancestry to lead them. As the writer John McWhorter noted, “What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land.”

To this day, the very fact of getting elected remains Barack Obama’s greatest achievement. That may sound like faint praise, since it was, after all, the American people who did the electing. But credit must redound to Obama as well—even if it is to candidate Obama, not President Obama. Breaking the color barrier required a rare and refined set of talents and attributes, not simply a certain pigment. Obama’s obituary will doubtless open with this watershed feat, and whether he rates a paragraph or a chapter in history textbooks, this salient fact will merit prominent mention.

Yet for all the magic of 2008, Obama hardly looks transformational today. The problem wasn’t, as some imagine, that he abandoned his rousing and visionary rhetoric. On the contrary, he continued to stir hearts and win praise when he spoke in a moral register—at Newtown after the school killings, or at Charleston after the church murders. But by and large Obama’s noble words and refined sensibility touched those who already shared his worldview. He didn’t gather new converts as his presidency progressed; he found it hard even to sustain the loyalty of the old ones. (He was the first president to win by smaller popular and electoral margins in his second term than in his first.) He communed majestically with his base, but he left growing segments of the nation cold, if not alienated. Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, he was elected on the hope of unifying the country, only to leave it more divided and polarized than when he came to office. That wasn’t mainly his fault, but it is brute fact.

Obama’s greatest strength turned out to be his greatest weakness. As a man who, in his own person, had striven to reconcile the inheritance of his white, Protestant, Kansan mother with the patrimony of his black, Muslim, Kenyan father, Obama had learned to prevail—whether as a community organizer, Harvard Law Review editor or elected official—by bringing opposing factions together. The ideal of conciliation was a leitmotif of his major speeches; he held out hope that he could bridge red and blue states, black and white Americans, democrats and autocrats, West and East. But he didn’t always know what to do when his adversary had no interest in conciliation. The result could be a damaging relinquishment of power, whether to Mitch McConnell or Vladimir Putin.

To look skeptically upon starry-eyed claims about Obama’s transformative power, of course, is not to deny his more mundane—we might even say transactional—achievements. To praise Obama as a transactional leader may seem odd given his lack of negotiating chops, his capitulations to the Republicans, his failure to pass big bills on immigration, climate change, gun control and other priority issues. But Obama had an under-appreciated pragmatic streak which led him to worthy compromises on a range of issues, including phasing out the Bush tax cuts and revising government surveillance practices. In fact, the fact that Obama did cut deals with the Republicans shows that GOP truculence can’t be blamed entirely for the gridlock that otherwise prevailed. For in these cases Obama proved that the Republicans, for all their bluster about making him a one-term president, always had some ultimate price at which concessions could be bought—it’s just that Obama couldn’t always find that price or perhaps (not wrongly) didn’t want to pay it.

So instead of transforming, Obama muddled through, as many good presidents have. To borrow a phrase, he hit singles and doubles. This is no slight. Under Burns’s definition, a transactional leader isn’t necessarily less effective or consequential than a transformational one. He or she just operates in a different vein.

Obama’s admirers don’t usually cast him as an transactional president because it’s at odds with the image he proffered. In 2008, Obama positioned himself as an alternative and antidote not just to the free-market conservatism and military adventurism of George W. Bush but also to the gradualist, pragmatic, take-what-you-can-get liberalism of Bill—and, by extension, Hillary—Clinton. Obama defeated Hillary for the Democratic nomination that spring not because of any major policy differences but because he promised something new, something different, something bolder.

Yet as early as the fall 2008 campaign, Obama was already showing another side. When he needed to win over the white working-class voters whom Bill Clinton had shepherded back into the Democratic fold (and who—in another painful irony—had backed Hillary in the 2008 primaries), Obama dropped the hopey-changey schtick in favor of bald economic appeals. He began to talk about the challenges of plummeting housing values, coping with credit-card debt and the difficulties of saving for college and retirement. Quietly, Obama had adopted the Bill Clinton playbook. Given the economic disaster that hit the country that September, it worked.

Obama’s presidency, too, turned out to be Clintonian in key respects. Both took on the thankless task of fixing a recessionary Bush-wrecked economy and succeeded in producing consistent growth, though Obama’s economy took longer to revive and was never as robust as Clinton’s. Both tried massive health care overhauls—Obama successfully (as of now), Clinton unsuccessfully; both were thanked with the loss of the Congress. Both thereafter faced a disciplined, obstructionist opposition that forced them to scale back their grand legislative ambitions.

Yet both achieved a number of unheralded gains, either through executive action or budget process negotiations. The young voters who imagine Clinton as having been hostile to the welfare state forget the ways he persistently steered funding to his desired programs, even in the absence of big-ticket legislation. For Obama, a quiet triumph came with the budget deal no one wanted to take credit for, the so-called sequester, which lowered what had been crippling deficits. Obama even mimicked Clinton’s lame duck rediscovery of the 1906 Antiquities Act to preserve swaths of federal lands.

Where Obama broke from the Clinton script was in foreign policy, and not, alas, for the better. Rightly compensating for the Bush administration’s overreach and overreliance on the military, Obama swerved too far in the opposite direction, treading far more lightly on the international stage. Clinton was no hawk, but between the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions and his retaliations against al Qaeda, he ensured that America was feared as well as loved. Obama used force more often than is realized; there are even “boots on the ground,” of a sort, in Syria, in the form of special forces. But on the whole his keenness to avoid foreign entanglements, to not do stupid stuff, as he put it, wound up creating problems of a different sort—including, most dangerous of all, a resurgent Putin who brazenly interfered with the 2016 election. Still, in foreign policy, too, Obama managed some base hits and even two-baggers, including the New Start treaty, the pivot to Asia, and (depending what happens next) the nuclear deal with Iran.

The irony is that while Obama talked up the value of rapping out modest hits in foreign policy, when he might have benefited from something more of a long-range strategy, in domestic affairs he felt uncomfortable identifying as the kind of pragmatist who would get on base however he could—even though amid economic hardship and partisan warfare, that kind of scrappy play was probably what America needed most. Now, as we hear the rumblings of Donald Trump’s henchmen descending on Washington, the hope that Obama would somehow transmute the character of the American people—make us less quarrelsome and more tolerant, less tribal and more inclusive, less self-certain and more liberal-minded—seems altogether quaint, an aspiration wistfully recalled. But those same ominous hoof beats also surely help us to appreciate the solid gains that this diligent president eked out, to praise his abiding prudence and dignity, and even, if we grant ourselves a margin of sentimentality, to admire his genuine love of books.