Four years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then, has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming out of a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The partisanship he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class incomes he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren’t bad luck or the lingering effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his “transforming” purposes. …

Mr. Obama was elected first and foremost with a mandate to fix the economy. Yet when he found himself by rare confluence of luck with 60 votes in the Senate, he put nurturing a fragile recovery secondary to the pursuit of pent-up liberal social policies. …

His second-term agenda is more of the first: More government spending disguised as “investment,” more subsidies for green energy, more regulation for other parts of the economy, a renewed push for cap and trade or an energy tax, protecting ObamaCare at all costs, and one of the largest tax increases in history to pay for it all.