Especially nowadays, when presidents are expected to create jobs and cure cancer, voters undervalue the simple virtue of cleaning up. But history, taking a longer view, looks kindly upon presidents who pass the kindergarten test, beginning with George Washington, whose great and improbable accomplishment was to hand John Adams a start-up government in good working order. By contrast, even presidents who cut formidable figures and score significant achievements suffer in the standings if they leave a mess behind. Consider, among the presidents in my own 56-year lifetime, the four who bequeathed a major mess to their successor: Lyndon B. Johnson (who left behind the Vietnam War), Richard Nixon (Watergate and its aftermath), Jimmy Carter (double-digit inflation), and George W. Bush (economic collapse). Nixon is judged a failure, and LBJ and Carter are seen as tragically flawed, which I believe will also be history’s judgment of Bush 43 (Iraq, albeit a strategic disaster, wasn’t a crisis when he left office). By contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy (although he exited prematurely), Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton left a relatively clean desk, and they maintain strong reputations despite their shortcomings.

Edmon de Haro

The point is not to rank presidents’ culpability. Leaving a clean desk requires both skill and luck. The point, rather, is that we should never take cleaning up for granted and that history is right to give it great weight, because it is hard. And it is important. By leaving behind no crisis, a president like Eisenhower or Bush 41 or Clinton gives his successor the two biggest gifts a new president can ask for: time and discretion.

Of course, the desk in the Oval Office is never entirely clean. Every new administration inherits problems. Kennedy had Cuba, Clinton had Somalia and the Balkans, Bush 43 had a Palestinian uprising. What they didn’t have was a crisis: the kind of emergency that sucks up attention and resources and forces a president into reactive mode from day one. They had the luxury of setting their own agenda, rather than struggling to close out their predecessor’s. That’s the difference between a problem and a crisis.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. How does he rate on the cleanup scale? The only fair answer, I think, is: impressively high.

After years of slow recovery, the economy is chugging along. As a result, Obama’s successor will be free to focus on, or perhaps ignore, longer-term economic challenges—globalization, inequality, entitlement spending, tax reform.

On security, the situation is astonishingly noncritical. The Trump campaign’s alarums about mayhem on the streets were, in a word, unhinged. The violent-crime rate, despite a slight uptick in 2015, remains at nearly its lowest level since the early 1970s. The risk of being killed by a terrorist is a quarter the risk of drowning in a bathtub. If you had predicted, on September 12, 2001, that there would be zero major attacks within the United States over the course of 15 years, you would have been sent for electroshock. Both Bush and Obama, and many people working for them, deserve credit for the American homeland’s remarkable safety, but Obama kept us safe while also retiring the War on Terrorism and restoring America’s reputation for decency.