The Art of Politik

preview SPECIAL FEATURE: The Obama Delusion

This is a preview of an upcoming piece that will be titled "The Obama Delusion". The piece will be posted sometime this week.


With the familiar and infamous closing line to virtually every presidential speech, "..and may God bless the United States of America", new President, Barack Obama waved goodbye to a packed crowd in Chicago's Grant Park with the understanding of the 'change' mandate that he had just gotten from America's voters.

The president surely knew the change he was going to bring, but as sure as America was of who they wanted to be their 44th president, few people understood what it was that he would do. Failing to understand that resulted in really low or exceedingly high expectations for him and inevitably has caused some reservations among those who voted for Obama. People naturally resist change, so to have so much of it already done has caused unease about gambling on such an ambitious agenda with so much change at a time when a turn for the worse could have proved disastrous.

Progressive democrats embraced his message, taking to heart his words and having a perception of Obama's agenda being more ambitious and more leftist than any president has tried in the past.

Centrist independents couldn't separate the incumbent republican candidate to his predecessor, and thus they took the mantra of change to simply mean something other than George Bush. In making this judgment, independents seem to have underestimated how much change Obama intended to bring. This is partly to blame for increased calls for the president and congressional democrats to slow down their efforts to make significant changes to address monumental problems.

Mainstream democrats on a whole tend to be quite satisfied with the president's job performance, however, they also seemed to miscalculate how hard he would push for bipartisan votes, whether or not the piece of legislation necessitated a republican to cross over for passage. This route has angered many, battered the patience of others, and it has caused dissatisfaction at the concessions being made for the sake of bipartisanship that it almost makes one forget the democratic party has super majorities in the congress.

It seems like the only group who didn't underestimate where the president intended to go with his agenda were republicans, but even they didn't expect Obama to be as pragmatic as he has been. His pragmatism has caused him the most problems within the party and within the congress. Republicans supported his first Afghanistan surge in almost greater numbers than democrats. Today, this is being repeated as he nears another troop decision. His moderate stance on gay marriage has angered part of the base and his support of second amendment rights has forced conservatives to claim the stance as a facade.

When it comes right down to it, most people simply projected their own perception of change and led themselves to miss the mark...