Our friend Juan Williams is sometimes a clear thinker, but not in this Wall Street Journal column. (It is printed in full below.) In The Clouds Over Obama’s Second Term Juan sadly follows the intellectually lazy path and concludes that any sincere opposition to Mr. Obama’s intentions is, well, insincere. It is predictably about race.

Juan of course, as a “progressive” commenter on politics is not interested in what is good for America of the future, the America his children and grandchildren will inherit. Rather, he’s obsessed with who is winning the game today.

He observes that the first obstacle preventing Mr. Obama from dictating is entire agenda is those Wascally Wepublicans who still control the House and who, while fewer in numbers in the Senate, actually believe in their Constitutional right to have differing opinions from Mr. President.

The second obstacle is the high expectations of Mr. Obama’s supporter. The nerve of them, imaging a Maoist Marxist regime, and Mr. Obama leaves their dreams unfulfilled. They will be a challenge indeed!

Even Juan must realize that his first two obstacles are laughable as evidenced by his embrace of the universal number three fall-back: Racism!

It can’t be that those of us who embraced Ronald Reagan’s conservative politics as teenagers many years ago, we who admired Bill Buckley and read all that he wrote, us who were disappointed that Richard Milhouse Nixon and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush were all liberals masquerading, sincerely reject Mr. Obama’s policies. No we don’t sincerely reject Juan says, it’s because we’re bigots, racists, and troglodytes. That settles it.  Were Mr. Obama no half-black, we’d love his schemes!

It would seem that Juan is projecting. Like most on the left, he is obsessed with race, uses it as the universal blunt instrument and sadly succumbs to the “bigotry of low expectations.”

We do like Juan and we are disappointed . . .

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By Juan Williams

Four years ago on this page, when Barack Obama took his oath of office, I celebrated the amazing reality of a black president but wrote: “No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.”

Now, after President Obama’s re-election to a second term, the question of how to judge his leadership takes on new power.

Even in 2013, anyone highly praising or strongly criticizing Mr. Obama can run into charges of either making patronizing excuses for a lackluster first four years or being mean-spirited and racist. This has contributed to the extreme political polarization in Washington today. But judgments have been made and will be made again as the president begins his second term with two ominous clouds looming over his final four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The first is the so-called second-term curse of scandals plaguing American presidents in the modern era. Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace over Watergate, Ronald Reagan was tied up with Iran-Contra and Bill Clinton was impeached over a sex scandal. By the end of his second term, George W. Bush was laid low by two unpopular wars and a crashing economy.

Mr. Obama’s second term is already moving against strong political headwinds. The GOP still controls the House. Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, but Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.

Every second-term president since Dwight Eisenhower has had to contend with an opposition party controlling at least one chamber of the legislative branch. But never has a modern president confronted an opposition less interested in governing than in blocking the chief executive’s agenda. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell famously declared in 2010 that his No. 1 goal was to make Mr. Obama a one-term president.

Mr. McConnell’s party failed—and lost seats in both the House and the Senate. But there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.

The second cloud over the president’s new term is the extraordinarily high level of expectation attached to him by supporters. While Mr. Obama’s “rock star” persona is fading and his second inauguration will be less exciting, the nation still likes the president and has a lot of emotional investment in him.

In 2009, on the eve of Mr. Obama’s first inauguration, the Pew Research Center reported that he had an astoundingly high personal-approval rating of 79%. As he prepares for his second inauguration on Monday, Pew reports that his personal approval rating is down 20 percentage points but still stands at a strongly favorable 59%. According to Gallup, his job-approval rating was 68% in February 2009; Gallup now has him with a solid 56%.

It is difficult to quantify, but one factor for anyone judging Mr. Obama is race. The biggest bloc of voters opposed to the president are older white men. He lost 57% of the white vote in 2008 and 60% in 2012. Meanwhile, he won over 90% of black voters in both elections.

Typically, Mr. Obama avoids the issue the way Superman avoided kryptonite. He makes the point that he is not “the black president” but the president of all Americans. But when it comes to judging his place in American history, it is impossible not to address his minority status. The first blacks in any field, much like the first women, are always held to strict standards.

Major League Baseball could not allow just any Negro ballplayer to break the color line in 1947. It had to be Jackie Robinson, who was both an exceptionally dignified man and a great baseball player.

President Lyndon Johnson could not appoint just any great lawyer to be the first African-American on the Supreme Court. Before becoming a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall held the record for winning cases before the high court, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down segregation in public schools. He served with distinction as solicitor general and as a federal judge.

When President George H.W. Bush selected the first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he selected Colin Powell: a four-star general and decorated American war hero whose qualifications were unquestionable.

As president, Mr. Obama is dealing with scrutiny of his performance on the level of Robinson, Marshall and Mr. Powell—a scrutiny that is magnified by political passion. One theme of GOP campaign ads in the recent election was to appeal to voters who supported Mr. Obama in 2008 by essentially telling them not to feel bad about firing the first black president—he was just in over his head.

Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr. Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House. By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.” Liberal critiques of the president usually call for more passion, more anger in defiance of GOP obstructionism, and a willingness to “go big” and offer solutions equal to the scale of the challenges the country faces.

Whether regarding deficit reduction, immigration, black unemployment or gun control, many of his otherwise most fervent supporters have come to expect a president who is unwilling or unable to do big things.

A more generous reading of his record thus far would give this president more credit for steadying the economy after the greatest collapse since the 1930s, for ending the war in Iraq and soon the war in Afghanistan, for killing bin Laden, for reforming a broken health-care system, for standing up for consumer protection, and for overhauling the student-loan industry.

Still, the president bears some responsibility for the difficulty in judging him. It was Mr. Obama, after all, who claimed in June 2008 during his Democratic nomination victory speech that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

With four years as president in his past and another four ahead of him, Mr. Obama might want to lower the exaggerated expectations. The clouds of partisanship, economic uncertainty and threats to world peace present challenges enough. It is up to him to rise to those challenges—and to the opportunities they present.

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.