<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As should be painfully obvious, an awful lot of people pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 because they were tired of Republicans; because they were bored by the wars; because they didn’t like McCain or Palin, or both; because Obama seemed optimistic and reasonable; because the financial crisis hit in September; because they didn’t listen to a word the Democratic candidate said but were nonetheless convinced by the vapid ‘hope and change’ stuff and the (always empty) promise to rise above ‘politics’; and, yes, because he was black. … One of Obama’s biggest mistakes — perhaps his biggest mistake — was to conclude that he had a mandate for his brand of progressive change. He did not. The Obama campaign was always, in fact was deliberately, divorced from his politics. A smarter, less egotistical man would have realized as much. Obama did not. … [T]he Left likes to explain away the failure of the last four years with vague charges of ‘Republican obstructionism,’ but this explains neither the continuing liability of the still-unpopular Obamacare nor the real damage to himself that the president did while he enjoyed majorities in both the House and the Senate. Republican ‘obstructionism,’ remember, was only made possible by the 2010 ‘shellacking,’ which was the product of the Democrats’ running riot for two years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
–columnist Charles C. W. Cooke<\/a><\/p>\n