White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer Friday hit back at the idea that 2014 was a disaster for President Obama, saying it was the president’s “most successful year since the Republicans took over the House in 2010.”
“Let me start with a controversial premise: 2014 was a year of great progress for President Obama and the progressive agenda,” Pfeiffer wrote in an op-ed for Medium, saying critics were “distracted by the sound of heads exploding across the Beltway punditocracy.”
Pfeiffer’s case is that even though Democrats were embarrassed in the 2014 midterms, Obama showcased real economic gains this year, ushered in sweeping environmental regulations, overcame the botched Obamacare rollout, protected up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation and saw a slate of judicial nominees confirmed in the waning moments of the congressional session.
Republicans counter that White House officials are either spinning the year’s political developments or are delusional, as the president’s approval ratings hover around 40 percent and he faces a GOP Congress in 2015.
But Pfeiffer said some detractors were being held captive by a seemingly endless barrage of bad news overseas.
“In many ways, 2014 was a messy, gloomy year defined by breathless, two-week news cycles focused on all that is scary in the world,” he wrote. “Putin in Ukraine, terrorists in Syria, an Ebola epidemic that never hit here, the Malaysian airliners, just to name a few examples. At home, the big story was often historic congressional dysfunction.”
Obama’s long-time aide said the president lived up to his promised “year of action.”
“Years from now, people will look back on 2014 as one the most significant and successful years of this historic and tremendously consequential presidency,” he claimed. “It turns out you can get a lot done with a pen and a phone.”
