Obama was always going to have a special place in history books as the nation's first African-American president. For as long as the Republic lasts, his will be the first nonwhite face grade-schoolers encounter as their eyes scan, from left to right, the timeline of American presidents starting with George Washington.

That's no small feat given the nation's peculiar history...[However, it is] in Obama's actions that his claim for a more substantive legacy lies...

Great National Crisis...

The Great Recession was in full sway by January 2009, destroying 500,000 jobs the very month he entered office. While it's easy to forget now, the fear of a depression was vivid then.

Enter Obama's much ballyhooed and much derided $900-billion-plus economic stimulus, which was on the drawing boards in the weeks between his election and his inauguration. Many partisans may still debate whether it was the lance that slayed the recession dragon or splintered ineffectually against it.

The consensus of economists who study these things using abstruse mathematical equations, however, is that the stimulus was the difference between a painfully slow recovery and Great Depression II, the sequel.

"We ought to remember how bad the situation was there because the economy was just falling off a cliff," said Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economics professor and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve...

Health Care And History

If it weren't for the fact that Americans are a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately people, keeping the economy from the ultimate peril might seem like enough to ensure a presidential legacy.

But of course Obama didn't stop there. Aided by the same Democratic-controlled Congress that passed the stimulus without a single Republican vote in the House and just three in the Senate, he also won passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

"After all is said and done, this administration did succeed in a way that no Democratic administration has succeeded in laying a foundation for universal health care," said Robert Reich, the Clinton-era labor secretary and University of California, Berkeley, public policy professor...

[Regarding previous attempts at Health Care Reform] "Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the cards were so stacked against him that he didn't even add it to the New Deal," said Reich. "Harry Truman could not do it. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, they all tried and they failed. Bill Clinton tried and notoriously failed. And we should not ignore that remarkable accomplishment. It's not perfect. But it's a foundation. And it will be developed upon and added to."

'You Lie!'

Of course, not everyone would agree with Reich's view that the health care legislation was a net good. Or Blinder's that the economic stimulus was salutary. Indeed, an entire political movement — the Tea Party — sprang from opposition to those and other Obama initiatives.

The antipathy toward Obama and his policies in some quarters rose to such a pitch it spurred something Americans had never seen before: a member of the opposition party shouting "You lie!" at the president during a joint session of Congress.

That anger undoubtedly fueled the Republican juggernaut of the 2010 midterm elections, leading to the Democrats' loss of House control in a rout of historic dimensions. The divided Congress has ever since been the greatest obstacle to Obama's continued agenda.

While many Obama supporters have wished the president would match his opponents' enmity and fight ire with ire, so to speak, Obama — who rarely seems to simmer, let alone boil over in public — has generally maintained his signature detachment, his cool...

'Extricator In Chief'

This pragmatism has been especially evident in his foreign and national security policy. Whether it's been ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq, drawing down forces in Afghanistan, killing terrorists, navigating the Arab Spring, containing Iran, pivoting to Asia or waiting for Israel and Palestinians to once again decide they have no good alternatives to negotiations, his approach has been more to deal with the world as he finds it than to try remaking it after some American ideal.

On foreign policy and national security, "he's had no spectacular successes, save killing Osama bin Laden, but no spectacular failures either," said foreign policy expert Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, who has advised Republican and Democratic secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli relations...

"Obama has understood that we do not have the luxury any longer of playing loose with when, why, how and where we project our military power. That's why I call him the extricator in chief. He is extricating America from the two longest wars in our history where the standard of victory was never, 'Could we win?' but, 'When could we leave?' "...

Second-Term Goals

As his second term begins, Americans now have a clearer idea of what to expect from their president, even though it may not be clear how he will accomplish what remains on his agenda, including immigration reform, gun control and putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal path, given the partisan divide and gridlock of Washington.

But anyone who has followed Obama's extraordinary American story should have learned by now that he has a knack for confounding expectations, especially of those who, as his Oval Office predecessor might say, make the mistake of "misunderestimating" him...