Barack is back, with things looking up

President Barack Obama treated the press conferences held just before leaving for his Hawaii vacation as the last chance to leave a good impression for the year.

But even given the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the 2014 edition had a rosier tinge than the year before.

In 2013 he was focused on countering the disastrous Obamacare rollout, the failure of gun control legislation and the uproar over government surveillance programs.

There was some happy talk about immigration reform passing through the Senate but, well, we see what happened there.

This year he was at least defending actions that advanced his agenda. Changes in the administration’s policy toward Cuba and his executive actions on immigra- tion were topics of the day.

For someone who’s supposed to be a lame duck, Obama didn’t seem to be limping much.