Romney was constrained, though, by the busted economy he inherited from President Obama — and the economic picture promptly grew worse. “Watch for unemployment to climb above 9 percent,” right-wing sage Cal Thomas wrote a year ago. He got that exactly right.

So did the analysts at Wells Fargo Securities, who shunned the irrational exuberance of some market-watchers at the end of 2012 and instead predicted that the S&P 500 would remain relatively flat this year.

The only positive economic indicator was the price of oil. As Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson anticipated last December, “Sometime in the first half of the year, the price of oil — which, depending on the type of crude, has hung stubbornly in the $90 to $120 a barrel range — will drop sharply to between $60 to $80 a barrel.”

Although it was a bad year for President Romney and the economy, Congress finally redeemed itself in 2013. Liberal talking head Bob Beckel called it. “In the aftermath of the massacre at Newtown,” Beckel said a year ago, “Congress will finally get the backbone to reinstate the assault weapons ban that ended in 2004.”