By FRED BARNES

President Obama is eyeing a new tax cut to boost the economy. He wants to “reduce the costs of our health care programs.” He’s eager to “meet” the deficit-reduction target of the Simpson-Bowles commission. He’s “confident” he can reach a “grand bargain” with Republicans on taxes and spending. To get it, he promises to be breathtakingly bipartisan. “I’ll wash John Boehner’s car,” he told a radio interviewer. “I’ll walk Mitch McConnell’s dog.”

This sounds like meaningless election-year chatter, but there’s more to it than even Mr. Obama might suspect. If he’d done in his first term what he now vows to accomplish in a second term, he’d be in a far stronger position to win re-election next Tuesday. He might have been a shoo-in. 

From the day he took office in January 2009, Mr. Obama hasn’t lacked for opportunities. His first initiative was an economic stimulus package. After he told Republicans that he wanted their input, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor personally handed him a one-page list of pro-growth proposals, including a 20% tax cut on small business income and a reduction in the two lowest income-tax rates. “Eric, there’s nothing too crazy in here,” Mr. Obama said after looking over the list.

But when the administration’s $831 billion stimulus bill was introduced three days later, it contained none of the Republican ideas. Would the pro-growth tax cuts have made the bill more stimulative? Yes. Would the economic recovery have been stronger? Most likely, but how much stronger is unknowable.

A compromise backed by congressional Republicans would have been a political windfall for the president. Instead, he made matters worse by accusing Republicans of spurning his offer of a bipartisan stimulus. In truth, he made the offer while addressing the House Republican Conference the day after Democrats had finalized the stimulus bill—without consulting Republicans.

The president’s next opening occurred in January 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat previously held by the late Edward Kennedy. Mr. Brown ran a single-issue campaign dedicated to stopping ObamaCare. His election gave Republicans the 41st vote they needed to block the bill by filibuster.

By then, the Senate and House had passed different versions of ObamaCare. The expectation in Washington was that Mr. Obama would seize the Brown moment to embrace a scaled-back, less-expensive measure that Republicans would support. Or that he’d give up on health-care reform for the time being. The president did neither. He adopted the most partisan, divisive approach conceivable.

AFP/Getty ImagesPresident Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at the White House, July 23, 2011.

In the past, entitlements affecting millions of Americans—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—had been enacted with votes from both parties. But Mr. Obama used a procedural gambit known as reconciliation to gain Senate approval of ObamaCare by a simple majority vote. The House followed by narrowly ratifying the Senate version.

For this, Mr. Obama paid an enormous political cost. ObamaCare, already unpopular, emerged as the most damaging issue for Democrats in the 2010 congressional election. Republicans captured the House, plus six Senate seats, and stymied the president for the next two years. The mere anticipation of ObamaCare, which goes into effect in 2014, has sharply discouraged hiring and job creation.

Soon after the midterm election, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—aka Simpson-Bowles—issued its report. Mr. Obama had established the body by executive order (after Congress refused to), so it was his commission. He informed its 18 members: “Everything is on the table.”

That wasn’t the case. ObamaCare was protected, but the president still balked. The commission called for cutting the deficit by $4 trillion and proposed a bold tax-reform plan to lower rates and shrink the deficit. The president’s response was dismissive: He would study the report. He mentioned Simpson-Bowles fleetingly in his State of the Union speech a month later. He ignored it entirely in his proposed budget. Not surprisingly, his reputation for fiscal irresponsibility spiked.

The commission’s report—it was never officially adopted since only 12 of the required 14 members voted for it—was dead. That is, until the president revived it last week in an interview with the Des Moines Register. The commission’s deficit-reduction target, he indicated, is “a good foundation for long-term growth.” But that was also true in 2010, when it would have done more good.

Mr. Obama told the Register (whose endorsement for re-election he was soliciting but didn’t get) that he can doubtless achieve a “grand bargain” with Republicans on spending and taxes in the first six months of a second term. In fact, he could have gotten that last year if he hadn’t botched the negotiations.

He and House Speaker John Boehner had all but signed a $4 trillion deficit-reduction agreement in 2011. We’ll never know if it would have passed Congress because the president clumsily reneged on the deal. “Especially baffling was President Obama’s decision to make his critical request for $400 billion more in revenue in a spur-of-the-moment phone call” to Mr. Boehner, Bob Woodward writes in “The Price of Politics,” an account of Mr. Obama’s domestic-policy troubles. Mr. Boehner backed out, distrustful of bargaining with the president.

Mr. Obama won’t find it easy to negotiate a fresh deal. He has alienated Republicans at his own expense. He said that they put “party over country,” an unsubtle way of calling them unpatriotic. In April 2011, he invited GOP leaders to a speech that they expected to be conciliatory. It wasn’t. Mr. Obama accused them of cruelty to “children with autism or Down syndrome,” plus other fiscal, moral and un-American abuses.

Mr. Obama told radio talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week that his re-election will smooth over bad feelings. He’ll “once again bring the Republicans together with my administration and Democrats and say to them, ‘The election is over, we have some big problems to solve, and the goal of making me a one-term president is behind us.’ . . . Probably the first piece of business is going to be to go ahead and fix our deficit and debt issues and make a decision about how big our government is and how we’re going to pay for it.”

These big problems aren’t new. And they’ve only gotten worse since Barack Obama became president. Had he taken them seriously before now, one can imagine the results: a faster economic recovery with lower unemployment, a popular form of health-care reform, a grand bargain with real spending cuts, a smaller deficit and declining debt-to-GDP ratio, and a less polarized Washington.

All that was possible—and still is. On Tuesday, voters will decide if Mr. Obama, having many times failed, deserves another chance.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News commentator.