UK: Great Expectations

PJ: Remembering that the President of the United States is not a dictator would serve Americans well. The fact is that the leader of the free world must rely on a Congress to establish laws and assign a budget for the country's expenditures. It is the job of both the presidency and the houses of Congress to work together for the betterment of the country. The success or failure of any President is often the joint success or failure of the Congress. Expecting the US President to make good on all campaign promises is unrealistic since they do not have carte blanche.

The Economist

Disappointed liberals
The expectations game

JONATHAN CHAIT, looking at American liberals as they try to gin up enthusiasm for Barack Obama's re-election campaign, offers a theory of why they are so disillusioned:

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

As Mr Chait points out, Mr Obama has logged a lot of activity as president, most of which Democrats said they wanted—the health-care reform, the recovery measures, the end of the war in Iraq, and so on. And his argument that conservatives are more inclined to group conformity and message discipline than liberals is probably correct, the occasional tea-party movement notwithstanding. This analysis, however, underplays the fact that Mr Obama set the bar for himself incredibly high. He was the guy who offered the implausible baseline. In June 2008, after the final Democratic primary, he offered the following remarks in Minnesota:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

I'm giving the long version of the comment because when these remarks are quoted on conservative blogs—as you can imagine, they've been teased—Mr Obama's qualifying clauses about how this can only happen if people are willing to work for it are sometimes omitted. Still, "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"? It's terribly grand. Grander, I think, than what we typically hear from a presidential candidate of either party. And it's odd, in retrospect, because Mr Obama himself is not much given to melodrama. In other words, there's a discrepancy between the campaign's rhetoric and the president's comparatively aloof, cerebral style.

Several hypotheses come to mind. One is that the candidate doesn't control all the campaign messaging. There was an unusual outpouring of spontaneous admiration around Mr Obama during the Democratic primary—the folk art, the crowds, the long-form essays. So although Mr Obama isn't as warm as, say, Bill Clinton, he had this kind of ersatz charisma cloak. That lasted him through the election cycle, but once everyone settled down to the hard work of governing, some of the goodwill dissipated, and it's been hard for Mr Obama to summon any rascally charm.

An alternative explanation would be that in Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama had a primary opponent who was manifestly competent and tolerable to most voters, who had a similarly moderate platform and who exceeded him in political experience. "I'm not a show horse," Mrs Clinton would say on the trail. "I'm a workhorse and I will go to work for you." It was a completely plausible pitch; Mr Obama himself seemed to think so, which is why he later hired her. It just wasn't very exciting. And so Mr Obama's way to win the primary against her was to present himself as the transformative candidate—a bit of an unknown quantity, perhaps, but the candidate with the potential to change the world and tame the ocean.

In any case, the degree of Mr Obama's personal culpability in the creation of these supersized expectations isn't particularly salient. He does have a defensible record as president, which is why liberals are defending him, even if they are disillusioned. And I agree with Mr Chait that if Democrats hadn't had such high expectations three years ago they might be more enthusiastic today. But it's hardly surprising that they had high hopes. That was a key selling point of the Obama candidacy.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/disappointed-liberals