Brian Hughes of the Washington Examiner documents how 2014 went wrong for President Obama.

President Obama envisioned 2014 as a year of redemption in which an ambitious slate of executive actions would ignite a dramatic turnaround for his unraveling second term.

Twelve months later, Obama is even more isolated politically, his standing with the public is further diminished, and he is left to assess his culpability for a dismal Democratic performance in midterm elections that put the remainder of his priorities in jeopardy.

Even Obama’s closest allies are left wondering what went wrong for a president scrambling to shake off his lame-duck status.

“It’s funny — if you had told me that the economy was where it is today, that this would have been the ‘state of the union,’ I would have anticipated a major bump for him,” a close former Obama adviser told the Washington Examiner. “Obviously, that didn’t happen. And yeah, it’s frustrating as hell.”

The president rang in January by declaring 2014 the year of his pen and phone, telling Congress that he would go around it on issues ranging from the economy to foreign affairs and environmental standards. The president, more than anything, wanted to check items off a long-stalled domestic agenda.

Yet, as soon as summer arrived, Obama’s plans were overtaken by a barrage of national security crises, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine and tens of thousands of unaccompanied children streaming across America’s southwestern border. Then, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a terrorist group the president once dismissed as the “JV team,” spread so rapidly through the Middle East that Obama was forced to order airstrikes to counter it.

With an Ebola scare looming, Obama would soon find that the November elections were at least partially a referendum of his handling of a massive federal bureaucracy in times of crisis.

Throughout it all, Obama insisted that Democrats would weather the storm in November, that Washington was getting worked into a frenzy over issues of little consequence outside the Beltway.

Democrats now say such thinking was the equivalent of political malpractice and indicative of what went wrong for Obama in 2014.