The Hill News

The political left that President Obama has disappointed and the right that is dedicated to his political defeat must agree that he is a decent and good man. Despite both their wishes (though their motives are quite different) that America had a different (read stronger-weaker) leader, he may be reelected, though the likelihood of that inevitability is diminishing (how it could happen is the subject of another essay to follow). Those of us who were elated by his campaign and election â€" we who, as the expression went, “drank the Kool-Aid” â€" have a lesson to learn about electoral politics.

A recent editorial by Matt Bai in The New York Times stated that neither President Obama’s election in 2008 nor the Republican congressional victory in 2010 really had as much to do “with the orthodoxies of liberalism or conservatism” as advertised. Bai attributed both those political phenomena to “manifestations of long-bubbling frustration with the stat! us quo … ” That may be so, in part, but in the case of President Obama, I have another theory.

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