With less than three months left in office, Barack Obama enjoys moderate approval ratings among the American people. Early in his presidency his approval rating hit a high of 67%, later plummeting to a low of 38%, and eventually settling in to its current level of 52%. This is further evidence of the strange paradox of the Obama years; many Americans give him a pass personally even as they reject his policies.

Obama has stated on multiple occasions, “I will not be on the ballot, but everything we’ve done is going to be on the ballot.” And so it is that he has hit the campaign trail, and recorded personalized campaign ads for Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and a number of down-ballot Democrat candidates, in an effort to secure his legacy.

Oddly enough, while Obama himself enjoys modest popularity, his coat tails are very short. In fact, being tied to Obama has been downright disastrous to Democrats over the last eight years. Since Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, Democrats have been eviscerated at every level of government except the White House, having lost a net total of 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, 11 governorships, and a staggering 910 state legislative seats. Republicans now control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers (and control both chambers in 30 states), and more than 60% of the governor’s mansions.

Obama has always had a hyper-inflated sense of his own worth. In 2008, giving his nomination acceptance speech, he entered a stadium and ascended a stage which was bordered by massive Greek columns. Prophesying of his own greatness, he proclaimed, “Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

Alas, eight disastrous years later, we discover that Obama was less Zeus than he was Icarus, the ill-fated would-be god who made wings of feathers and wax and soared into the heavens … only to have the wax melt, sending him crashing back to Earth.

Obama, the week before his inauguration, declared that we were just a few days away from “fundamentally transforming” the United States. That much, we suppose, was true. America has been transformed alright, but not for the better.

In eight short years, Obama has doubled the national debt — in other words, accumulating as much debt as every other president combined. His so-called “stimulus” bill added a trillion dollars to the debt and saw the unemployment rate skyrocket to 10%. Under Obama, a record number of Americans are on food stamps, and we’ve endured the worst economic “recovery” since the Great Depression. We have fewer Americans working today, as a percentage of the population, than at any time since the Carter malaise.

Obama, with a super-majority Democrat-controlled Congress, passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote. He promised ObamaCare would “bend the cost curve down,” that it would “not add a single dime to the deficit,” that the average family would save $2,500 on premiums, that every American would be covered, and that access would be improved.

Instead, thousands and thousands of doctors no longer accept Medicare, Medicaid, or ObamaCare coverage. More than 27 million people still do not have health insurance today, roughly the same amount as before ObamaCare. We can’t keep our doctor or insurance, even if we liked our doctor or insurance. And of the 23 Obama-Care co-ops that were supposed to be the hub for acquiring insurance, 17 have gone bankrupt and shut down, and five more are on life support.

And all of that was before the devastating news that came out this week that the average price of an ObamaCare policy will go up by a crushing 25% next year. Even Obama-ally Bill Clinton called it a “crazy system.”

Obama’s lawlessness has been repeatedly rebuked, literally dozens and dozens of times, by unanimous Supreme Court decisions against him, throwing roadblocks before his imperious drive to unilateral “rule” of the country. (Unfortunately, the Court helped him preserve ObamaCare. Twice.)

His foreign policy has been disastrous, making the country and the world far less safe than when he took office. Russian bombers patrol off the coast of California, Iranian patrol boats harass the mighty U.S. Navy with impunity (Obama gave them $150 billion and a green light to develop nuclear weapons as a reward for previous belligerent behavior, so why not?), North Korea is testing missiles that seek to carry nuclear warheads to U.S. shores, and we’re even having two-bit Muslim terrorists fire cruise missiles at U.S. ships. Weakness on our part begets aggression by evil regimes.

But hey, transgenders and homosexuals can openly serve in the military now, vets are being forced to repay bonuses, and we’re running Navy ships off biofuels (at a whopping $29/gallon), so who cares if the military is actually trained and equipped to defend America and her interests?

Right now, the media has been focused non-stop on the circus of the presidential campaign, so the growing number of Obama’s failures, like the collapse of ObamaCare, has largely been overlooked. But the American people have not forgotten the struggles they’ve endured under Obama, who has transformed America from a constitutional republic into a leftist, dystopian banana republic.

When all of the ballots are cast, Obama may just find that, as with massive mid-term shellacking of Democrats in 2010 and 2014, his coat tails are not as long as he expected them to be.