First came the scandals.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledged that it had targeted tea party groups’ applications for nonprofit, tax-exempt status and subjected them to heightened scrutiny, giving Republicans a way to rally their base after a dispiriting election.

Edward Snowden’s leaks of scads of classified materials detailing the vastness of the National Security Agency’s spying operation not only put Obama on his heels for months but badly damaged his credibility with U.S. allies such as Germany and Brazil.

Republicans insisted that the Obama administration had covered up information about who knew what and when regarding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered high-profile testimony before Congress, and the attack got so politicized that it squashed U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice’s chances to succeed Clinton at State.

And then there was the Affordable Care Act, the single biggest achievement of the president’s five years in office. The rollout of the federal health insurance exchange, one of the law’s key elements, was a complete failure — even though we didn’t realize it until Republicans reversed course on their own massive political flub and reopened the federal government after a 16-day shutdown. (The GOP’s lack of any coherent strategy may have been the only silver lining in Obama’s year.) On top of that, Obama’s oft-repeated pledge that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” wasn’t, well, true — Politifact even deemed it the “Lie of the Year.” He later made a public apology.