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All year long, I pick the winners of the Worst Week in Washington prize — those politicians, bureaucrats, sports stars, business leaders and other inhabitants of Planet Beltway who stand out for all the wrong reasons. During 2013, the honorees have ranged from the president to the president’s dog, from meteorologists to comedians, from Supreme Court justices to NFL head coaches (well, mainly one NFL head coach).

Winning the Worst Week in Washington is one thing. To win the Worst Year in Washington, you need to be very good at being very bad, or have really bad luck. Previous Worst Year winners have included then-Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele (remember him?), the tea party movement (always a contender) and Congress (yes, all of it).

This past year offered plenty of candidates, but who is most deserving of this least desirable recognition? (Hint: He’s still in power but has little of it these days.) I also decide who had a really bad year, merely a bad year, a not-so-good year, a good year and, yes, who had the best year in Washington. Let me know, in the comments section or on Twitter (#worstyear), if you agree.


Squandering the chance to build a legacy

When historians write the story of Barack Obama’s presidency, 2013 will be his lost year. It opened with great promise and closed with equally great disappointment. In a year that could have been about building his legacy, the president was instead reduced to salvaging the signature accomplishment of his first term.

The chasm between what was expected and what was delivered was evident in the precipitous drop in Obama’s approval ratings throughout 2013, all the way down to George-W.-Bush-second-term territory. Dashed expectations sent Democrats up for reelection in 2014 fleeing for cover and comforted Republicans still smarting from their party’s 2012 defeat.

Second-term presidencies are tricky. The pace of modern politics and the desire of journalists (scourges!) to always look ahead to the next campaign put a reelected incumbent in a race against irrelevancy from the second he is sworn in again. Scandals tend to creep in or escalate — Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky — and investigations follow, often drifting far afield. Momentum toward any meaningful achievement fades.

Usually, a president has until the midterm elections of his second term to get big things done; after that, attention moves on to deciding who will next occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But Obama may not have the luxury of even that truncated timeline. The split control in Congress — Democrats in charge in the Senate, a Republican majority in the House — combined with the tea party’s continued demand for conservative purity from its elected officials and the politicization of just about everything makes it hard to imagine that 2014 will afford Obama any chance to move his agenda through Congress. And his addition of John Podesta, a vocal advocate of taking executive action to end-run lawmakers, to the White House staff suggests that the president has effectively given up trying to work with the Hill.

All of which makes what happened — or more accurately, what didn’t happen — in 2013 that much more dire for Obama’s chances of leaving a lasting legacy on his party, Washington and politics more broadly.

Let’s start from the beginning, or a bit earlier. Despite a tenuous economic recovery and an unpopular health-care law, Obama surged to a convincing win in November 2012. The victory gave him a mandate to continue in the vein of his first four years, as well as providing a damning assessment of the GOP’s ability to attract any voters other than white men.

Obama used that momentum to cut a favorable deal with Republicans to avert the “fiscal cliff,” and he was able to unite the country after the horrific murder of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

On Jan. 1, then, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the passage of a broad gun-control measure, an immigration reform package, and a series of bills addressing the country’s debt and spending issues. The reasons none of these things came to be all lead back to Obama.



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.

As if the self-inflicted wounds and scandals everywhere weren’t enough to ensure the demise of Obama’s agenda, Republicans in Washington spent 2013 in a public slap fight over the direction of their party. Even if the president had been able to extricate himself from the problems that cropped up throughout the year, it became abundantly clear early on that there was not one Republican with whom he could negotiate, whether on guns, immigration or anything else.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — he of the fiscal cliff agreement — was loath to associate himself too closely with anything that reeked of bipartisanship as he dealt with a conservative primary challenge back home. (McConnell did ultimately step in and cut the deal that ended the government shutdown, a mercy killing for his side.) Speaker John Boehner couldn’t lead House Republicans anywhere as the tea party wing repeatedly rebelled against him (on the farm bill, Hurricane Sandy relief, the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization and so on), leaving him speaker in name only.

Add it all up, and you get the least-productive Congress in history (only 55 bills have been passed by both chambers and signed into law this year); the least-popular Congress in history (Nickelback, used-car salesmen and political reporters are all liked more ); and a president most Americans no longer like or, perhaps more important, trust.

Yes, the economy is showing signs of improving. And yes, enrollment on HealthCare.gov is soaring compared with the first few weeks. Those facts provide hope for those who believe that 2014 will be better for Obama.

But 2013 is almost gone and with it the president’s best chance for a lasting legacy. The damage done to Obama’s brand will linger well beyond this calendar year. There are no second chances in presidential tenures. Barack Obama, for wasting a year torpedoing your legacy, you had the worst year in Washington. Congrats, or something.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Kill the messenger, Kiki?

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Kill the messenger, Kiki?

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Looking at the background of the author is now "killing the messenger?"

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Kill the messenger, Kiki?

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Looking at the background of the author is now "killing the messenger?"

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When you have nothing to say about what he wrote, but instead try to make out that he's biased, and despite the fact that the Washington Post editorial board isn't gonna let him go with a major article in their paper without checking it our pretty well...

Yep. I'd say that's killing the messenger.

You have any comments on the points he raised, or will you also just try to change the subject?


"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Originally posted by kpo:
The suggestion is that:

1. The Washington Post would never allow bias (or anti-Obama bias?) in their opinion pieces

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2. That we shouldn't check the credibility/biases of sources

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3. That we should care what one man, biased or not, thinks of Pres. Obama

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Why don't YOU say what YOU think is valid and noteworthy in this article Geezer?

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I'm probably as big an Obama fan as anyone here, but is it supposed to stop me in my tracks if one random journalist thinks Obama has failed in his presidency?

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Originally posted by kpo:
The suggestion is that:

1. The Washington Post would never allow bias (or anti-Obama bias?) in their opinion pieces


No.

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Is anything that the article said untrue?

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Is one joke about Hillary Clinton overwhelming evidence of bias?

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Did or did not Pres. Obama say on multiple occasions that if folks wanted to keep their insurance, that they could? Did or did not the Healthcare.gov website fail in its rollout? Did or did not...

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When it's one man who has the editorial backing of the Washington Post, maybe you could consider it.

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Originally posted by kpo:

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Originally posted by kpo:
The suggestion is that:

1. The Washington Post would never allow bias (or anti-Obama bias?) in their opinion pieces


No.

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Actually that was the suggestion. Nobody accused the man of lying/being prone to factual inaccuracies.

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Interesting. You're not accusing him of lying or being prone to factual inaccuracies, but because he might be biased, his truthful, factually accurate statements have no validity?

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Pres. Obama did state folks could keep their insurance. The healthcare.gov site rollout was a failure. The NSA is monitoring citizens' phones. The IRS did target conservative organizations' applications. These are facts, not opinions.

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That's what they're doing when they ignore the content of the story and attack the author.

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That's what you're doing as well.

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This is one man, and one newspaper, noting the objective failures of the Obama administration.

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"And btw, I've seen the WaPo 'back' conservative opinion numerous times. Usually when you post it here. I don't know what point you're making going on about the Washington Post."


No.

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And I'm still asking for a rebuttal of the points made in the article, rather than excuses to ignore them.

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Originally posted by Geezer:


Yep. I'd say that's killing the messenger.

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by Geezer:


Yep. I'd say that's killing the messenger.

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Then you are misusing the term.






"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

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Originally posted by Niki2:
So now, Geezer, you've given up reading entirely??

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By the way, it wasn't "The Post's selection", it was Chris Cilliza's EDITORIAL OPINION. Try at the very least to be that accurate, even if you have no intention of reading people's replies to you.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
"Is anything that the article said untrue?"

Why, yes, there's a lot that's untrue.

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You apparently disagree with the Post's selection of President Obama as having the worst year in Washington.

Just out of curiosity, will you at least concede that Pres. Obama has had a pretty bad year

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I noted that you disagreed with the "Post's selection..."

Since you criticized the Post article at length... and tried instead to blame everything that went wrong with Obama's plans on someone else

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Originally posted by kpo:
And this article nails it:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/alternative-look-obamas-5th-ye
ar

It's not personal. It's just war.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
Geezer, they don't like it when someone puts a mirror in front of them.

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Both KPO and Niki claim that they believe that Obama has had a bad year, which was the premise of the article I cited, so I wonder why they have to post so much about it.

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Guess they just can't prevent themselves from attacking the folks who post anything critical of the President.

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Originally posted by kpo:
Point to one instance of me attacking the writer of this article .

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Originally posted by kpo:
Point to one instance of me attacking the writer of this article (or Niki for that matter).

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by kpo:
Point to one instance of me attacking the writer of this article .

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"I'm probably as big an Obama fan as anyone here, but is it supposed to stop me in my tracks if one random journalist thinks Obama has failed in his presidency?"





"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by kpo:
Point to one instance of me attacking the writer of this article (or Niki for that matter).

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And Niki attacks the poster of the article.

"Is Geezer actually this myopically dumb?"

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Originally posted by Niki2:
I call trolling.

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