For Obama, 2014 could hardly have been worse

In 2013, they included the Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting of conservative tea party groups, the botched rollout of Obamacare and Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency surveillance leaks that gave aid and comfort to our worst adversaries around the globe.

That’s for starters. This year, former Soviet KGB agent Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Obama trusted enough for a “reset” of relations with Russia, seized the Crimean Peninsula and sent forces and arms into eastern Ukraine, getting off scot-free with little more than a sanctions slap on the wrist. He’s still there.

Then the scandal of scandals unraveled at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where aged veterans were kept waiting for months for lifesaving treatment, as officials doctored their records to show a much shorter waiting time. Many died waiting.

Throughout this period, Mr. Obama was caught asleep at the switch in the war on terrorism and has been playing catch-up ever since — drawing blistering criticism for his indecision, ineptitude and timidity from a tell-all book by former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta.