Is Obama a Great President or a Drag on the Democratic Ticket?

“Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history,” Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, writes in an essay for Rolling Stone, “In Defense of Obama.”

During a discussion about the essay on the program “This Week” on ABC, Mr. Krugman, a self-proclaimed Obama skeptic, said that his rankings of presidents “in modern history” would be “FDR, LBJ, Obama and then Reagan.”

This glowing assessment flies in the face of the president’s approval rating — currently about 41 percent. Yet Mr. Krugman argues, in his essay, “High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better.”

Still, Howard Kurtz at Fox News points out that Democrats running in midterm elections might not be feeling the same way: “If Democrats are hanging on in the Senate shootout, it’s in spite of Obama, not because of him.”

Mr. Kurtz sees Obama’s performance and approval as linked: “If the economy wasn’t still having an anemic recovery six years into Obama’s tenure, his approval would be higher. If he had moved earlier to beat back the ISIS terrorists, his approval would be higher. If he hadn’t botched the ObamaCare rollout, his approval would be higher.”

And Guy Benson at Hot Air, looking at state-by-state approval ratings, says, “The good news is that Barack Obama’s weakness, ineptitude and ideological overreach has become so undeniable that majorities in 43 of our 50 states now disapprove of his job performance.”

Indeed, in light of those numbers, as Jonathan Martin reports for The New York Times, Mr. Obama has been benched by his own party in midterm campaigns: “The president who became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win a majority of the vote is flying in politically restricted airspace.”

But in an accompanying piece to Mr. Krugman’s essay, the editors at Rolling Stone point to different numbers — “figures that prove President Obama has accomplished more than you may realize” — in support of Mr. Krugman’s argument:

“Peak unemployment, October 2009: 10 percent

Unemployment rate now: 5.9 percent

Consecutive private sector job growth: 55 months

Private sector jobs created: 10.3 million

Federal deficit, 2009: 9.8 percent of GDP

Deficit in 2014: 2.8 percent of GDP

Average under Ronald Reagan: 4.2 percent of GDP”

Mr. Krugman highlights the president’s accomplishments in the areas of health care, financial reform, the environment, the economy, national security (sort of — “It’s hard to get excited about a policy of not going to war gratuitously”) and social change.

“Virtually every achievement Krugman recounts,” according to Ezra Klein at Vox, dates to the first two years of the Obama presidency, when Democrats held huge majorities in congress and over “screaming” Republican opposition.

But they came at a price, says Mr. Klein: Those years “are the story of Obama being haunted by his promises of a postpartisan presidency, and choosing, again and again, to pass bills at the cost of worsening partisanship.”

The achievements came “by breaking American politics further. The candidate who ran for office promising to heal Washington’s divisions became the most divisive president since the advent of polling,” Mr. Klein says.

Perhaps the president and his administration were naïve to expect more cooperation, Mr. Klein continues, but “they thought that success would build momentum; that change would beget change.”

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks, was he naïve? “Did he really think he could pass liberal legislation with some level of Republican cooperation?”

His answer: “In Obama’s case, it sure sounded like more than pro forma campaign blather.”

“The big difference this time around was the opposition,” Mr. Drum adds. Most presidents receive “some level of cooperation from the opposition party. Maybe not much, but some. Obama got none. This was pretty unprecedented in recent history, and it’s hard to say that he should have been able to predict this back in 2008.”

Other observers point out areas that Mr. Krugman either overlooks or overestimates in Mr. Obama’s favor. Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate, for example, writes that “Krugman also, somewhat surprisingly given the source, doesn’t mention President Obama’s lack of interest in the lobbying/corporate-money-in-politics issues that Candidate Obama talked about often.”

Cole Stangler at The New Republic disputes the praise for Mr. Obama’s environmental record: “If the planet is to avoid a two degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels — the internationally recognized threshold that, if surpassed, will unleash the most nightmarish effects of climate change — then we need to start leaving carbon in the ground, right now,” he says. “Given that math, the least we might ask of an American administration is not to exploit the reserves that happen to fall within U.S. borders. We might also ask that federal policy encourage a faster transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

“On both counts, the administration has failed.”

Still, Mr. Krugman does not see a perfect president: “There’s a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I’ve covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly.”

He concludes: “Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like.”