Obama's Failing Was a Lack of Ambition

Nobody thinks Margaret Thatcher’s claim on posterity is that she was Britain’s first female prime minister. Admirers and critics alike know she was more consequential than that. Barack Obama was America’s first black president, which is a huge thing and a fine thing. But when you’ve said that, you've probably said what matters most about his time in office.

Perhaps it was harder -- less probable -- for a black man with little experience of government to be elected president of the U.S. in 2008 than it was for a woman to lead the British Conservative Party to electoral victory in 1979. Obama’s rise to the presidency was a remarkable accomplishment. Talk about audacity. But reflecting on his eight years in office, one wonders how much ambition he had left after that.