When Barack Obama became president in 2009 he filled America with a sense of hope that had not been seen in American politics for some time.

However, with those hopes came lofty assumptions from a public hungry for radical change.

Aaron David Miller is the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President” and he argues that the expectations for Obama, and all American presidents are far too great to begin with.

All presidents disappoint in some way or another, that is the nature of politics and Obama was particularly romanticised as a figure of transformation.

Aaron Miller writes about how Obama, once a media darling was bound not to live up to his own hype.

“By nature, Obama is not a partisan, a populist or a revolutionary. Instead, he finds his comfort zone in conciliation and accommodation, and in the empirical world of rational policy analysis. Those can be useful qualities in many circumstances, but they won’t make you a transformative president.

Obama cannot claim the persona of Kennedy, who captured the nation’s imagination; nor the mantle of Ronald Reagan, who as Obama himself has admitted , changed the trajectory of the country.”

Miller knows what he is talking about, for two decades he served as an adviser to Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State.

In his book he claims there have only been three great presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Miller explains his criteria for greatness:

“For me, greatness means the following - you confront one of the three greatest nation-encumbering crises that the country faced; you extract from that crisis, as you weather it some sort of transformative change that makes the nation better forever; and, in time, you are appreciated by your own partisans, as well as your adversaries, as a true national hero.” 

Aaron Miller spoke to Sean Moncrieff: