Gibbs: ‘No doubt’ that 2013 was Obama’s worst year

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday that there was “no doubt” that 2013 had been the worst year of President Obama’s presidency.

“No doubt about it. I would say this is the worst year of the presidency. It does beat out 2011,” Gibbs told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The former Obama spokesman and aide said that the president’s stumbles were particularly magnified because they came following his reelection.

{mosads}”Especially given sort of where he started, the fact that the first year of his second term was historically the most productive of the second term,” Gibbs said.

Still, Gibbs expressed optimism that promising economic indicators could give the president a boost in the remaining three years of his presidency.

“I will say this: If the economy continues to grow as we saw it grow in the third quarter, at 4.1 percent, he might do that press conference with whiskey, celebrating the fact that the economic boom has really come back,” he said.

During the president’s year-end press conference on Friday, his first question was on whether 2013 had been the worst year of his presidency.

Obama respond by saying he didn’t evaluate his success that way.

“If I look at this past year, there are areas where there obviously have been some frustrations, where I wish Congress had moved more aggressively,” Obama said.

The president also admitted that problems with the ObamaCare website were “a source of great frustration” and that his poll numbers had taken a hit.

“I guess what I’m saying is if you’re measuring this by polls, my polls have gone up and down a lot through the course of my career,” Obama said. “I mean, if I was interested in polling, I wouldn’t have run for president. I was polling at 70 percent when I was in the U.S. Senate. I took this job to deliver for the American people.”