That was about what he did during his presidency, not about achieving the presidency in the first place.

If becoming president is your main achievement including two terms as president then that's sad, not good.

Even Reagan will be remembered because he's seen as a factor (not all good, but ok we'll give him a pass) in the collapse of the former Soviet Union. And Reagan was embarrassing in many other respects.

Obama will be remembered as the guy that could have changed so much but didn't. Part of that is his own fault, he was harping so much on hope and change that some of us (including me) actually believed he meant what he said.

Consider me disappointed.

I'm extremely disappointed in him as well (without buying into the hope hype). We do have to take into consideration that the opposing party has declared that their number one priority was to limit him to a single term and had been entirely obstructionist.

Also, as President he is in theory limited in what he can actually do. Case in point: he promised to close Gitmo but is unable to do so because it requires Congress to make it happen and they are not cooperating.

I really hope that one day we will have progressed far enough that the skin color or ethnic heritage of our presidents is ignored by the history books--ideally diminishing to a factoid on the same class with "so and so hated broccoli".

I also hope (and think) that we will get to that point, but that doesn't mean the history leading there won't be important, and things like Obama becoming the first non-white president will likely be remembered as key things which helped get there, next to people like Rosa Parks.

Who was the first US president to speak out against slavery? (Hint: it wasn't Abe Lincoln.) I think this factoid will ultimately matter about as much to the average American after we've had 5 more black presidents.

Who was the first Catholic president? Sure JFK did several other important things, and there were other events that transpired that made him famous.

Still, I think it's pretty important that Obama was at least partly black - it showed that it could be done, and I'm sure he inspired millions of people (black and otherwise).