WASHINGTON—Explaining that he failed to hit his national growth goals for the April-June period, the White House’s Office of Personnel Management confirmed Tuesday that President Barack Obama fell just short of earning a quarterly performance bonus. “We lay out our expectations very clearly in a meeting with the president at the beginning of every fiscal quarter, and unfortunately he came up a bit shy of meeting the targets we set for him,” said White House administrator Sarah Hammond, citing a number of factors that reflected negatively on Obama’s performance evaluation, including his inability to raise GDP by the stipulated 2.75 percent or create 750,000 new jobs, benchmarks that Hammond said were “ambitious, but achievable.” “The president knew what his Q2 goals for health care sign-ups were, but he was unable to deliver the numbers we were looking for. He certainly didn’t knock it out of the park like [Secretary of Transportation] Anthony Foxx, who easily exceeded his target of 20 new highway interchanges over the same period. Now, if President Obama could achieve anything close to that next quarter, it would go a long way toward securing that $1,500 bonus.” At press time, sources confirmed that the president was somberly explaining to his wife and children that their trip to California would have to wait until next year.

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