As White House advisor David Axelrod conceded in Believer, his memoir of unbelievable faith in one particularly flawed false prophet, even voters who supported Barack Obama find serious problems with his policies. But while many consider him a bust, in some ways Obama could be the most successful president of all time.

As the late political scientist Barry Rubin noted in Silent Revolution, the president enjoyed great success at selling the idea that the statist, high-regulation policies that had failed so spectacularly in Europe were precisely what America needed. The old-line establishment media helped seal the deal, and Republicans, for all their talk of free enterprise, offered only token opposition.

At the same time, Obama succeeded in nearly doubling the national debt, which stands at $20 trillion as he leaves office. More than any other U.S. president, he succeeded in burdening generations not yet born. In similar style, he enjoyed fabulous success with his biggest lies.

If you like your health plan, you could keep it, he said. As the world now knows, you couldn’t keep it, and you wouldn’t save money, either. The president’s healthcare rule was “first, do harm,” and he succeeded in the probably the greatest “taking” in U.S. history.

As Obama sees it, you should not be able to get the health care you want. Rather, you should get only what the government wants you to have. This is all part of the “longer game” his apologist David Axelrod explained in Believer.

Along with his lies, the president served up some of the biggest whoppers of all time. At Ford Hood in 2009, self-described “Soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” Nidal’s victims included private Francheska Velez, 21, pregnant and preparing to go home.

The President of the United States called this “workplace violence,” not even “gun violence.” It was as though Richard Nixon decried the Manson murders as juvenile delinquency. With little challenge from Republicans and the echo-chamber media, the workplace violence whopper enjoyed great success.

Obama also surpassed other presidents in deploying the IRS and Justice Department against his domestic enemies. He politicized the State Department and was very successful at getting the “Intelligence Community” to tell him what he wanted to hear. Beyond that, his greatest success was passing himself off as something other than what he really is.

The outgoing president was born in Hawaii and grew up as Barry Soetoro, stepson of Indonesian foreign student Lolo Soetoro. In the 1995 Dreams from My Father, the father is the Kenyan foreign student Barack H. Obama, but the book raises doubts.

The author speaks of a “useful fiction” and calls the Kenyan father “a prop in someone else’s narrative,” someone he could “alter on a whim or ignore when convenient.” True to form, in an archive of documents from 1958 to 1964, including many letters, the Kenyan Barack H. Obama mentions nothing about an American wife and son born in 1961.

“I don’t know how I’d deal with it, if it really came out that he really is a fraud or a con.”

That was the Kenyan’s son Malik Obama in 2015. Malik Obama sees a strong physical resemblance between the president and Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American Stalinist, identified only as “Frank” in Dreams from My Father.

The father also has “character” issues, and the author cites “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny.” With help from the echo-chamber media and the “birther” red herring, the president succeeded fabulously in protecting himself from scrutiny.

The rest, as they say, is history.