New Orleans     Big, fat surprise in the land of hateration, President Obama’s popularity is shooting up, up, up. He’s now over 50% and rising. Articles in the papers are starting to wonder why he’s not getting more credit for the economic recovery in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Indiana, since nationally unemployment is down to 5% and in some places in the Midwest it’s in the 3s. What’s up?!?

Part of it is clearly the fact that many on the right, middle, and even the left, are looking at the candidates vying to take his place and saying, Holy Jesus, what has God wrought! Hillary Clinton is dying out there with progressives, the young, and many women, feminists included, are putting their hands over their faces to hide big, fat yawns. Bernie “Old as Dirt” Sanders has managed to have less negatives than Clinton, even wearing the red vest of socialism proudly under his suit jacket. In fact his numbers are higher than Hillary’s in one-on-one polls against Donald Trump, if the general election were tomorrow.

And, that brings us to the Republicans, mercy me! It’s not just that they all measure up like Lilliputians next to a giant, but they are scaring the dickens out of huge numbers of the American public. Perhaps most importantly when we look at the drivers behind the contradiction of this puppy love of a large segment of the white working class for a billionaire of all things, it’s not the just the easy answer of being left behind in the modern economy, but the anger is the old anger deeply embedded in race, pure and simple. The more this campaign drags on, the more the suspicion of the African-American electorate that a lot of the venom directed at the President is based on the fact that he’s black more than his policies is verified as hard cold reality.

Thanks to the schoolyard bullying and brawling of the Republican primary, even hardcore ideological opponents among the nation’s punditry are also having to admit that they have to give President his due. There can’t be any argument that he brought dignity to the office. Compared to the hip shooters vying for the job, being Cool Hand Luke now looks good to some of his opponents. They even concede he has good manners, a picture perfect family, and has presided over his two terms with hardly a wisp of scandal and nothing that would point in his direction.

Some of this may be the voters coming to grip with the “devil they know” being better than the devil they don’t know, but reading an unending piece in The Atlantic based on a series of interviews with President Obama about his driving philosophy, actions, and initiatives in foreign policy was a little bit like meeting Marshall Dillon and admiring his balance in working with nothing but trigger happy gunslingers. Obama didn’t call people out, but the reporter and the article made it pretty clear that without Obama’s restraint and courage if it had been left to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, and a litany of other advisers as well as what Obama called the dictates of the “Washington Playbook,” we would be stuck unendingly in the middle of the Syrian conflict with boots on the ground for years and years. Obama may not have deserved the Nobel Prize when he won it when he was still wet behind the ears in his first term, but in Syria, Iran, Cuba, and other areas, he has earned it now.

We all have just cause to complain about the lack of progress on many domestic issues in Obama’s first six years, save the “better than nothing” Affordable Care Act, but I would bet that his footprint on the world stage and White House lawn is going to be a tough act to follow for generations.