Mort Zuckerman’s piece titled The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama in the US News and World Report summarizes the word from the media one year after its idol became president of the United States.
Uh, Mort, some of us avoided being swept up in the drunken euphoria rampant in the 2008 Democratic primary and general election and instead endured the contempt shown those who opted for sobriety. Now we can only shake our heads at the sad spectacle you portray:
The air is seeping out of the Obama balloon. He has fallen to below 50 percent in the poll approval ratings, a decline punctuated by his party's shocking loss in the Massachusetts special election.
Why?
Barack Obama was undoubtedly sincere in what he promised, even if his promises were within the normal range of political exaggeration. The first trouble is that his gift for inspiration aroused expectations, stoked to unprecedented heights by his own staff, that he would solve the climate crisis on Monday, the jobs crisis on Tuesday, the financial crisis on Wednesday, the education crisis on Thursday, Afghanistan on Friday, Iraq on Saturday, and rest on Sunday. His oratorical skills were highlighted by the contrast with President Bush, who mangled words so much that his incoherence became, as Tina Brown wrote, "a metaphor for incompetence." Expectations were spurred, too, by Obama's recognition that Americans yearned for a new kind of politics, a rejection, as he put it, of "politics as usual."
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