None of this is going to drop Obama to the bottom reaches of the presidential rankings. No scandals of any seriousness. No street riots of the kind that helped bring down Lyndon Johnson. No intractable war such as Vietnam or Korea. No devastating economic downturn. Those are the kinds of things that get presidents into the lower reaches.

But neither has he logged the kind of performance that gets presidents into the upper reaches. No major new direction for the country. No new coalescence of voter sentiment. No realignment of political forces. No clear military triumph. No sustained period of robust economic growth. The country doesn’t seem to know where it’s going because Obama hasn’t set it upon a discernible path. Given that, it’s difficult to see him climbing to a high ranking in the occasional academic polls designed to assess presidential performance.

He’s likely to occupy a middling position along with such presidents as Lyndon Johnson, the two Bushes, William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge. Of course history makes its own judgment in its own time, and it can’t be rushed. So we’ll have to wait on that. As for the voters, we’ll know how they feel about Obama’s second term come November of next year.

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington political correspondent and publishing executive, is the author most recently of  Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.