President Obama, facing his last, best chance to rescue a second term overrun by unending crises and self-inflicted wounds, has hit the reset button on his presidency one final time.

With just two years left in office, Obama has used the humbling defeats of the 2014 midterm elections as license to pursue a newly aggressive strategy to implement a long-stalled domestic agenda. And he has initiated the type of White House shakeup typically sought by a second-term president desperate to brush off notions of irrelevance.