“Happy birthday,” Ellen DeGeneres tweeted to Barack Obama last week. “You busy? We could use some help.” Implicit in the tweet was both praise and rebuke—praise for being the sort of leader DeGeneres and many others would like to have once more, rebuke for being so low-profile in the era of Donald Trump. Many Americans would love for Obama to don a pink pussy hat and go full Olbermann on his successor. Others would like him to go away. And, of course, when it comes to Obama’s quotidian choices during the post-presidency, everyone has an opinion. He should—or should not—live in D.C., ink a deal with Netflix, take a large book advance, deliver speeches to Wall Street, build his presidential center on Chicago’s South Side, or, hell, dance at a Jay-Z concert. How about one more judgment, then, in which we review the career of post-2016 Barack Obama? Has he handled himself right or not? We’re here to help.

To review, some of the moves of post-presidential Obama have surprised people. Many thought he’d retire to Chicago, but he and Michelle Obama have instead installed themselves in Washington, D.C., not far from Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, at least until their youngest daughter finishes school. A temporary rental has become a full-fledged purchase, and the Obamas are installing a backyard pool, the sort of improvement that suggests a longer-term stay. Barack Obama initially made some cash by delivering $400,000 speeches to Wall Street, but the Obamas have since cut a deal with Netflix to produce shows and films, and their book deals are reported to be worth more than $60 million. Much of Barack’s time is spent traveling around the globe and visiting old political friends. When he and Michelle socialize at home, it tends to be with a small set of elite black Washingtonians. Things are low-key. The biggest news Barack made was in delivering a speech in South Africa in a celebration of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday last month. It was a plea for the preservation of the liberal international order that readers mined mainly for digs at Donald Trump. But Obama subtly threw in a few of those, too.

Now, we’re best off if we consider Obama’s moneymaking choices separately from his political choices. The former primarily has to do with seemliness. The latter has to do with effectiveness. Let’s take them one at a time.

Thirty years ago, people would have blanched at seeing an ex-president taking $400,000 to deliver a speech to Wall Street. Fortunately for Obama, though, when it comes to buckraking, he stands on the shoulders of giants. Gerald Ford was the first ex-president to start cashing in with paid speeches, but Bill Clinton was the first to see its full potential, like Les Paul with the electric guitar. From 2001 to 2015, the Clintons took in about $150 million in paid speeches, a nice supplement to several multi-million-dollar book deals. They also allowed Clinton Foundation work and government work to bleed into one another in notably lackadaisical fashion. If that set the bar of propriety, Donald Trump promises not only to lower it but also to break it, burn it, and shoot the ashes from a cannon aimed at CNN. Obama, in short, will look better than his peers.

At the same time, Obama’s choices have underscored some of his more frustrating attributes. His statements of principle and policy have never lined up consistently with his real-world actions. Obama could speak the language of working-class disaffection over trade or immigration, but he never acted much on either. He talked tough on Wall Street malfeasance, but his Justice Department barely punished anyone for it—quite the opposite. He spoke of restraint and moderation when it came to race and gender, but his administration in practice took a heavy-handed approach on most civil-rights matters in which it could intervene, from school discipline and local policing to Title IX guidance on gender. He spoke often of transparency, but his administration fell short on that front, and even the Obama library will not house his records. Today, Obama gently chides a class of billionaires who are “increasingly detached from any single locale or nation-state” and “live lives more and more insulated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin,” as he did in his speech in South Africa, but Obama’s policies rarely challenged the interests of that class, and his first post-presidential vacation was with one of its representatives, Richard Branson. In his post-presidency, Obama will criticize his social circle, but it’s still his social circle.