The early, very early, take on the Obama legacy is that it will be marred by the declining fortunes of America's middle class under his presidency.  This will be a tough narrative to counter.  But this is really not just Obama's fault.

First, I'd say you have to lay this at the feet of every president since Nixon.  This is all a consequence of the ever accelerating rise of the the emerging market export nations, particularly from Asia.  In some ways, it has actually helped the middle class by helping to keep inflation low.  In other ways, it has hurt as jobs have been moved offshore.  As a free trade Democrat, Obama has certainly done his part here.  But he is just part of a bipartisan tradition that now spans the entire post Viet Nam era of American foreign economic policy.

What has really hurt the middle class recently was the Financial Crisis, the Great Recession and the Slow Recovery.  Some of that can be lain at Obama' feet, but you'd have to be desperately partisan to take it too far.

The Financial Crisis had, at its roots, regulatory reforms that also span numerous presidents as Wall Street remade itself through consolidations and the establishment of large financial warehouses beginning in the late 1980s.  The securitization of mortgages helped make real estate ownership a reasonable store for middle class wealth but the high cost of real estate relative to middle class earnings even in the best of times means that such an investment will always dominate the portfolio of any normal saver.  In other words, middle class savers are more vulnerable to a decline in real estate prices than anything.  That real estate is always a leveraged investment makes that vulnerability much worse.

Wealthy people own smaller relative percentages of real estate in their portfolios.  They own larger shares of stocks, bonds, commodities and the like.  They are diversified.  They are also rich and can generally wait while a home owner with an underwater mortgage has no leeway. The rich waited out the worst of the Great Recession and were rewarded by a stock market that more than doubled.  Of course they gained serious ground since 2009.

To deal with the Great Recession, the government had to respond with both fiscal and monetary policy.  Monetary policy comes from the Fed and I think that Ben Bernanke did everything he could.  The liquidity that the Fed pumped into the markets enabled the stock boom and extended the bull market in Treasury securities.  This benefited the rich more than anyone else because they own stocks and bonds.  The Fed also recapitalized the financial system by paying banks to keep money on deposit, leaving them with that and a risk free carry trade as easy ways to pad earnings.

Well, the Fed oversees but also serves the financial system.  The government is supposed to look out for everybody else.  What we got was a stimulus plan that was about half the size it should have been (the rule of thumb is it should have been 5% of GDP over one year, we got 2.5% of GDP over a year for two years).  Obama can be criticized for asking for too little, but I think history has shown that the Republicans in Congress were never going to allow for more. That those same Republicans almost caused a new financial crisis by risking a debt default in 2011 is proof enough of their unwillingness to help.

The result of the 2011 crisis was the spending sequester.  This reduced government spending when it was needed the most.  Because the economy had entered its cyclical recovery (which would have been faster with more government spending) the sequester actually brought the debt to GDP ratio quickly down to sustainable levels.

We wound up with a robust Fed response and a weaker response from the government that turned into a counter-productive response.  The Fed actions structurally flow to the rich, so the middle class lost ground.  Within the context of what Congress allowed, it's hard to be too angry at Obama.  His biggest failure, I think, was that the Home Affordable Modification Program should have been used more aggressively to help borrowers and end the foreclosure crisis. 

But, overall, it seems to me that the tale of the last 8 years has actually been one of conflict between the Fed trying to push the economy along with the Republicans in Congress standing in the way.  We should have had something more like what's going on in Japan now where the government and central bank are actually collaborating to stimulate the economy.  That we had the opposite is not Obama's fault.

Presidents tend to get the credit and the blame for history.  But Congress, particularly the Tea Party members, wrecked the middle class recovery.