Thanks to liberal historians, the 44th president will probably get much higher marks than he deserves.

Obama and the Verdict of Posterity

by Matthew Hennessey

Conservatives have a low opinion of President Obama. So low, in fact, that most are convinced his presidency will ultimately be viewed as a failure—and at least one recent poll gives them good reason to feel confident about that. They see a moribund economy and Obamacare’s many snafus and presume historians will call the Obama administration incompetent. They see chaos in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine and think future generations will judge his foreign policy a disaster. They see the Bowe Bergdahl and IRS/Lois Lerner affairs—not to mention the Benghazi and V.A. administration episodes—and expect the Obama years to be remembered as scandal-plagued. Conservatives think history will be unkind to President Obama, but they’re wrong. History will more likely revere the first black president, ignoring his failures and amplifying his successes.

Journalism, it’s often said, serves as the rough draft of history, and American journalists, to an overwhelming degree, adore Obama. Their first drafts of the history of the Obama years will likely be laudatory. But more important, in the long term, than the opinion of today’s journalists is the attitude of historians—most of whom make their living in academia. It’s no secret that the American college campus is a bastion of leftism. A 2005 survey of faculty members at 183 four-year colleges found that 81 percent of politics professors and 77 percent of historians considered themselves liberals. The watchdog group Campus Reform examined Federal Election Commission data and found that 96 percent of political donations by faculty and staff at Ivy League colleges went to Obama in 2012.

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