On a sunny, brisk day in Washington, D.C., when the nation’s first African-American president was sworn in, another transition also took place: Kevin Martin’s resignation as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission became official. Martin is expected to be replaced by Julius Genachowski, a venture capitalist and Harvard Law School classmate of President Obama.

While Martin’s four-year term as chairman (he spent a total of eight years as a commissioner) was not without accomplishment, it’s safe to say his tenure was mixed at best. Taking over as chairman in 2004, he had four primary tasks that would define his career: managing the transition to digital TV, distributing the valuable wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band, opening up telecom competition to new entrants including the so-called “competitive local exchange carriers,” or CLECs, and increasing access to broadband Internet services across the country. None of those four has worked out for the best.

The transition to digital TV has been a mess, marked by squabbling among the major networks, cable providers, and large carriers. The Obama transition team, in fact, has proposed delaying the transition to work out some of the issues that should have been resolved by the Martin-led FCC.

The once-in-a-generation 700MHz auction, held in early 2008, was a triumph for the status quo, as the incumbent carriers, primarily Verizon Wireless (VZ) and AT&T (T), won most of the prized airwaves.

Competition in the telecom industry? What a joke. Martin’s efforts to reform the broken intercarrier compensation system were DOA, and as VON senior editor Kelly Teal reported last month, “Martin has been a staunch foe of the cable industry for reasons that never have been entirely clear,” and “has approved, without a seeming second thought, major telecom mergers that threaten competition.”

And on broadband access, arguably the single most important indicator of the FCC’s progress, Martin has failed miserably. “Despite what some advocates and analysts claim,” the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported last year, “the United States is behind in broadband performance and its rank has been falling since 2001.” In the ITIF’s listings of top broadband countries, the U.S. ranks 15th based on a composite index of broadband indicators including penetration, speed, and price.

What’s more, Martin leaves behind a demoralized and dysfunctional agency. A report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month found that Martin’s “heavy-handed, opaque, and non-collegial management style has created distrust, suspicion, and turmoil among the five current commissioners,” and that the outgoing chairman “manipulated, withheld or suppressed data, reports, and information” in order to guide the commission’s policies.

In other words, Martin has been about average among Bush Administration appointees. Good riddance.