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President Obama is ending 2014 in better shape than he probably imagined was possible just a few months ago.

U.S. economic performance brightened and corporate profits soared. Consumer confidence rose, along with financial markets. Seemingly in the swell of the December holidays, the president's moribund job approval numbers floated upward. And millions of people signed up to get or keep health coverage for a second year under Obama's embattled legislative milestone, the Affordable Care Act.

Growth and other data points headed in more optimistic directions, but millions of Americans continue to insist the country remains on the wrong track. Voters in November overwhelmingly swept Democrats out of Congress, legislatures and governorships, and in the process rendered Washington more politically cleaved, if such a thing is even conceivable.

Immigration reform legislation foundered again this year -- a disappointment to Latinos who reacted by encouraging Obama to ignore Congress and extend administrative relief from deportation to as many as 4 million undocumented migrants.

Siding with evolving public sentiment and a younger generation of Cuban-Americans, the president also ducked a resistant legislative branch to normalize U.S. relations with the Castro regime, ending 50 years of Cold War isolation.

It was also a year during which the president, reacting to bruising federal management bungles and bad press, said goodbye to members of his Cabinet, including former Sen. Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon; retired Gen. Eric Shinseki at the Veterans Affairs Department; and former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services. Along the way, Obama jettisoned the first female head of the U.S. Secret Service, Julia Pierson.

In an abrupt about-face over the summer, he reluctantly propelled the nation into what he conceded will be years of bloody battles in Iraq and possibly in Syria, against a terror group that did not exist in its current form when he ran for president. Even the abandoned U.S. "reset" with Russia in 2014, following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, was not as dramatic as the U.S.-led air war against black-clad Islamic State terrorists, who behead their captives with primitive brutality while exploiting today's social media for shock value. The president who campaigned in 2008 to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan headed in a direction he did not foresee.

At every turn, 2014 felt messy, contentious and, to many people, erratic. In the twilight of Obama's presidency, with his influence ebbing, he was a prominent target for complaints and anxieties, both at home and abroad.

"If I spent too much time worrying about critics, I would be not getting a lot of stuff done here," Obama said last week during an end-of-year interview with CNN's Candy Crowley.

His reference to "getting a lot of stuff done" was a White House rejoinder to voters who said in exit polls last month that they took a broom to Democrats as a way to force executive-legislative compromise. With Obama as president through 2017, many midterm voters said they thought Washington would be more likely to bridge political chasms if Republicans controlled Congress.

Originally posted here:
Obama's 2014: Buffeted Yet Buoyed by Late-Year Uptick