When it comes to rating his own performance, President Obama grades on a steep curve.

A Sunday New York Times story on Obama’s competitive nature featured many examples of the President’s tendency to claim that he is “outstanding” — or even the best — at any given task. Wrote The Times: “But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities.”

In an interview aired over the weekend, a Colorado reporter asked Obama, “your party says you inherited a bad situation — you’ve had three-and-a-half years to fix it — what grade would you give yourself so far for doing that?”

His reply was characteristic: “You know, I would say incomplete.”

The 23 million unemployed Americans might not be so charitable. The President is reaching the end of his fourth year in office, and the unemployment rate has remained above 8 percent during every full month of his tenure. As much as he talks about the middle class, he certainly is not helping it. A new study by the National Employment Law Project concludes that low-paying jobs (wages between 7.69 to $13.83 an hour) make up 58 percent of the new jobs created since the recession ended in late 2009. Higher-paying jobs (wages above $21.13 an hour) make up only 19 percent of the job growth in that time. On Obama’s watch, the middle class continues to shrink. After one Obama term, not only are Americans earning less, but they are burdened with an additional $5 trillion in federal debt to boot.

Obama’s scheme of borrowing trillions of dollars and spending them on “green energy” and “stimulus” and other of his personal pet projects is an utter failure. It deserves an “F,” not an “incomplete.” His winning charm and fine oratory cannot change that.