President Obama envisioned 2014 as a year of redemption in which an ambitious slate of executive actions would ignite a dramatic turnaround for his unraveling second term.
Twelve months later, Obama is even more isolated politically, his standing with the public is further diminished, and he is left to assess his culpability for a dismal Democratic performance in midterm elections that put the remainder of his priorities in jeopardy.
Even Obama’s closest allies are left wondering what went wrong for a president scrambling to shake off his lame-duck status.
“It’s funny — if you had told me that the economy was where it is today, that this would have been the ‘state of the union,’ I would have anticipated a major bump for him,” a close former Obama adviser told the Washington Examiner. “Obviously, that didn’t happen. And yeah, it’s frustrating as hell.”
The president rang in January by declaring 2014 the year of his pen and phone, telling Congress that he would go around it on issues ranging from the economy to foreign affairs and environmental standards. The president, more than anything, wanted to check items off a long-stalled domestic agenda.
Yet, as soon as summer arrived, Obama’s plans were overtaken by a barrage of national security crises, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine and tens of thousands of unaccompanied children streaming across America’s southwestern border. Then, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a terrorist group the president once dismissed as the “JV team,” spread so rapidly through the Middle East that Obama was forced to order airstrikes to counter it.
With an Ebola scare looming, Obama would soon find that the November elections were at least partially a referendum of his handling of a massive federal bureaucracy in times of crisis.
Throughout it all, Obama insisted that Democrats would weather the storm in November, that Washington was getting worked into a frenzy over issues of little consequence outside the Beltway.
Democrats now say such thinking was the equivalent of political malpractice and indicative of what went wrong for Obama in 2014.
“It’s kind of like they have 400 total yards of offense and can’t put the ball in the end zone,” said Democratic strategist Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “When you look at how great they operated in 2008, it’s surprising to see how little attention they spend on politics while in office. They’re still operating with the old media mentality, ‘When people see what actually is happening, they’ll be happy.’ The White House was wrong.”
The president was eager to flex his executive muscle early in 2014 after the botched rollout of Obamacare. Questions also lingered about his competence in the wake of scandals involving IRS targeting of conservative groups, the Justice Department’s monitoring of reporters and the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of citizens’ data.
Obama would later test the constitutional limits of his power with his unilateral decision to spare up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation. Polls now show that even those inclined to support the president’s policies disapprove of the way he has carried them out.
Some political insiders said Obama’s miserable 2014 was hatched in January, when he essentially decided to ignore lawmakers altogether.
“The president has got to deal with Congress. That was a pretty obvious mistake on his part,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “He created an echo chamber that did not allow him to get an effective sense of where he stood politically. When you decide to go it alone, as you develop policies, how do you determine what you need to do differently?”
