President Obama ends this Congressional session by signing a tax deal, a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, and probably the START treaty, but the Associated Press’ assessment of his past year is pretty brutal:

Barack Obama’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year got off to a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad start.
There he was, on New Year’s Day, on vacation with his family in Hawaii, stuck on a secure phone with counterterrorism officials, trying to figure out what screw-ups had allowed a would-be terrorist to board a Christmas Day flight with explosives in his underwear.
Things only got worse for Obama when he returned to Washington in between a pair of epic winter storms.
From the start, 2010 delivered a string of setbacks that built up to an electoral shellacking come November, to use the president’s own word.

Then they go through Obama’s year, month by month: Scott Brown’s victory, the vehement opposition to health care that never faded, the Gulf oil spill, the death toll in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s career-ending interview with Rolling Stone, the utter failure of the “Recovery Summer” sales pitch, the midterms… and now, WikiLeaks.

Unmentioned: The Times Square bomber. A sudden wave of staff departures. The unpopular DOJ challenge to Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement law.