The second campaign was little better. Obama gave better than he got when it came to explaining why he should be elected rather than the other guy, but that was only because he and his team provided a college level course in negative campaigning. That, coupled with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s inability to connect with ordinary voters and the GOP’s inexplicable decision to telegraph its strategy for the general election in the midst of the Republican primaries, made his victory a sure thing that more people should have seen coming.
The bottom line is that, in both campaigns, the president was sold to the American people like a rock star, not a political candidate. His campaign strategy was to offer the voters the chance to be part of something amorphously historic rather than to give them an agenda to get America working again. As such, being for Obama was a fad, a cultural statement rather than an expression of political conviction and, as we all know, fads come and go.
Obama has entered the “go” phase, thanks largely to the negative experience far too many Americans have had with his healthcare.gov web site. Sure there were lots of other indications that trouble was on the horizon – like the failure of the trillion dollar stimulus package to generate economic growth, the massacre in Benghazi (about which there are still more legitimate questions than answers) and his latest foreign policy gambit which involves selling Israel down the river in exchange for the nebulous promise of better behavior from Iran – but it’s the new health care law that is hitting people where they live and they don’t like it.