Beware Obama's big ideas: The president and his fans say the best is yet to come. That can't be good.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

THE WAY President Barack Obama's acolytes are calling for bold action in his second term, you'd think he had been some kind of prudent Calvin Coolidge in his first.

"A strategic second term would begin by identifying a list of necessary and achievable goals, and then pursuing them with the unyielding manipulative skill of a Lyndon Johnson," Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote after Obama's decisive victory over hapless challenger Mitt Romney in November. "Think big. Take risks. Get it done."

"Take this second chance to get it right on housing," wrote Tracy Van Slyke, director of something called the New Bottom Line, at The Huffington Post, "and use your mandate to help the millions of underwater homeowners across this country." Atlantic Associate Editor Matthew O'Brien didn't even wait for the election results to come in, calling on the president in October to unveil a bold second-term agenda that would embrace the "vision thing" by resurrecting his deep-sixed American Jobs Act.

Given that Obama won re-election largely by not talking about his record, it's probably not surprising that so many people don't seem to have noticed what happened from 2009 through 2012. To recap, Obama rammed through a massive overhaul of medical care in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. He piled another $830 billion or so onto the national debt with his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus. He also managed to push total debt over $16 trillion.

When the Affordable Care Act's most radical component, the requirement that every American be forced to purchase health insurance, came up for Supreme Court review, the president's bumbling attorneys lucked into a tortured decision in their favor, and the law was upheld by a 5-to-4 margin. Capitalizing on (though not actually solving) the financial crisis that helped him gain office, Obama in 2010 signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, bringing a massive new cudgel to the financial industry (which had hardly been free of Washington oversight and protection prior to that) and creating a federal "consumer" agency whose scope is still not well understood.

Unfazed by a public rebuke in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama continued his mission through a daunting new strategy of regulatory rule making, executive orders, administration through "White House liaison officers," and recess appointments of congressionally unpopular nominees...