Obama’s been hugely successful as president. He says.

You might not have realized it, but Barack Obama has been an enormous success as president of the U.S. The country he leaves behind is more peaceful, prosperous and respected than it’s ever been. Critics may suggest he’s been a disappointment, even a failure, but they’re wrong. It is difficult to think of an area of American life that isn’t in better shape than it was when Obama took office.

We know this because the president has spent his last days in office assuring us it is so. In a series of exit interviews, and a farewell speech in Chicago, Obama has portrayed his eight years as an overwhelming success. It may seem to many people that in choosing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as his successor, voters were telling the president they wanted something radically different than he’s offered them. Or that a truly transformative president wouldn’t need to work so hard to broadcast his achievements. But Obama does not accept that premise. The armour of his selfregard is not to be dented.

He has some valid points to make. He remains personally popular enough that, if he’d been able to run again, he might very well have won. Though he hasn’t said it quite so bluntly, it’s not his fault if Hillary Clinton blew the election. He mourns the fact that, busy being president, he didn’t have time to rescue the Democratic party from itself. If the party had done a better job of listening to Americans, rather than preaching at them, it might not now be preparing to protect itself from a Trump presidency.

Any national leader can quote statistics to demonstrate their success, and Obama did so, at length, in his farewell address in Chicago. Unemployment down, poverty down, incomes up. “The wealthy are paying a fair share of taxes even as the stock market shatters records. The unemployment rate is near a 10-year low, the uninsured rate has never been lower, healthcare costs are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years.”

Governments get the blame when times are tough, so Obama gets to claim credit for halting the 2008 economic meltdown and the return to growth. Some 20 million Americans now have health care who didn’t have it before. And some surprising figures Obama chooses not to emphasize: the number of immigrants deported for committing crimes actually doubled, while the number of Mexicans living illegally in the U.S., at 5.8 million, is a million below the Bush years.

Obama thinks it’s a record so astonishing that, if he’d promised it all in 2009, “you might have said our sights were set a little too high. But that’s what we did.”

Presented in the soaring rhetoric of which Obama excels, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and conclude that the many disappointments of the past eight years weren’t so bad after all. But once the eloquence ends, the reminders return. As he departs the stage, Obama revives memories of the exciting, inspiring figure who appeared eight years ago and offered hope and change to an eager audience. The problem is in the gap between the two: the delivery of so little when so much was expected.

Obama’s claim that, “by almost every measure, America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” is simply not true. Russia and China have made serious inroads on its influence. Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians have died while Washington hemmed and hawed indecisively. The U.S., the one country whose power might have alleviated the horror of Aleppo, stood by helplessly, having ceded the field to Moscow. Obama couldn’t even offer refuge to more than a handful of those who desperately sought to escape the disaster, one brought about in part by ruinously ill-conceived U.S. actions.

So many of Obama’s “achievements” are ephemeral, or reversible. His nuclear accord with Iran is a short-term patch that may only put off the reckoning. North Korea is more dangerous, and better armed, than it ever was. The Paris climate accord binds no one to anything. By turning the Affordable Care Act into a partisan crusade, he left it vulnerable to repeal. By treating Congress with disdain he earned its disdain in return, prompting the obstructive tactics that so damaged his agenda. If Americans are vastly better off, why do they not appreciate it, and why did they elect an inexperienced renegade who vows to bring down everything Obama strove to construct?

In his farewell address, the president acknowledged that many Americans feel left behind. Yet, despite eight years in office, he seems to lack any sense that he might bear some responsibility. Instead he lays the blame squarely on the usual suspects: the rich, the one-percenters, the corporate bosses who somehow contrived to continue thriving throughout his administration. He also doesn’t have an answer for why the first black president did so little to narrow the racial divide that still runs like an ugly scar across the country. “It’s good to be home,” he assured his Chicago audience, yet on his watch — and with his former top aide as mayor — Chicago has become a racially charged war zone, with murders up 58 per cent last year alone, to the highest level in two decades. Stuck for a response when questioned on the carnage, Obama remarked weakly that at least much of the killing is now caught on film, so guilt can be fairly assessed. But don’t expect to see him lending his considerable prestige to the struggle, as the Obamas are remaining in Washington until their youngest finishes school.

Despite his thin record Obama remains an inspirational figure to millions. He remains the only person to be awarded a Nobel Prize for making brilliant speeches. He can touch areas of hope and optimism in the young and disadvantaged that defy the less gifted. He’ll be boffo on the speech circuit, and could indeed help revive the spirits of his badly battered party. He is, to a large degree, the embodiment of the left: a figure of optimism and high aspirations who preaches an idealism few could reject, if only there were means to bring it about.

Unfortunately the means remain elusive, so once again more practical-minded people will be given their turn in the White House. You can’t eat idealism, no matter how inspiring it might be on the stump.