History will be kinder to the first two years of Barack Obama’s administration than the electorate next Tuesday. (That’s because history mostly gets written by gutless liberals, you can hear conservatives snort.) But history loves lists and the record of the 44th president and the universally despised 111th Congress boasts an array of legislative accomplishments unrivalled since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society years of the 1960s and the momentous opening charge of the New Deal in 1933. Facing his own midterm debacle in 1994, Bill Clinton, (now by a long way, the most popular politician in America), had nothing remotely comparable to run on. Between Mr Obama’s twin peaks of regulatory reform of the financial industry and healthcare, are unsung acts of excellence that speak to the gross inequities of American society: the delivery of medical insurance to 11m children hitherto deprived of it; legislation enabling women to bring legal action against employers who fail to offer equal pay for equal work; prohibitions against credit card companies jacking up interest rates without warning to extortionate levels.

History loves this kind of meaty record. But politics yawns at it. And on one critical matter, history will not cut the beleaguered president a break: the inability to protect his own power. That fatal flaw has come about through the one defect no one watching his ascent to the White House, punctuated as it was with so many exercises in eloquence, could have predicted: a failure to connect with the American people. But then Mr Obama has always inclined to the magnificent oration over the truck-stop rap. To keep the sympathy of the people you need your high mind to get down and dirty, and there is something about simplification to which this most intellectually complex of presidents is constitutionally allergic.

Which is not to say that, over the long haul, he will be remembered as a loser. Though he himself has said he would prefer to be a one-term president who did the right things rather than re-elected on expedient compromise; it is too soon to be writing the obituaries for his administration. For one thing, the expectations for the Democrats on election day have been so apocalyptic that any results belying them will be treated on the left with hysterical elation. Lately there has been some movement in the polls and not towards the right, nothing to get in the way of Republicans recapturing the House of Representatives but perhaps enough to thwart their control of the Senate.