Nobody is happy with Barack Obama, and nobody should be. You hear a lot of baseless criticisms, of course, from people who believed him when he promised the moon and haven't quite twigged to his having given them instead a Congress dominated by Republicans. Here Fareed Zakaria and other defenders of Mr. Obama are right. You can't expect a strong hand from a president who has only a weak one to play. But need this hand have been so weak, and couldn't Mr. Obama have played it better?
His main weakness, after all, is that the Republicans, having lost control of Congress in 2006 and sunk even deeper into detestation by 2008, were welcomed back with open arms in 2010. (They also registered sweeping triumphs at the state level.) There were no hanging chads in this election. It's small comfort to Democrats to note (correctly) that the public neither trusts their opponents nor agrees with their program. What does it tell you when your party is creamed by an opponent the public doesn't trust? Mr. Obama can blame no one but himself for this sweeping repudiation of his leadership.
Especially when the major issues are fiscal, a Democratic president facing a Republican Congress deserves our pity. Still, he needn't act such that pity will be accompanied by contempt. How have the congressional Republicans, hardly an assembly of the supremely brainy, managed to outwit Mr. Obama on every important issue? Yes, he had to make deals with them, but did they have to be such bad ones? Some defenders have said that it's to set up the Republicans to bear the onus of their fiscal rigour in next year's election. But if Mr. Obama really believes that the key to success in American politics is to hand your opponents major victories, then he has indeed brought a fresh new outlook to the Oval Office.
There are Obama-haters and Obama-lovers, even if the latter population has plunged into a demographic death spiral. Personally, I remain somewhere in between, a scratcher-of-the-head-about-Obama. I'm not persuaded that anybody (including himself) really understands what he's about. So much about Barack Obama – and not least the alternation of fierce partisan hardball with irresolute playing at being above the fray – defies easy analysis. You can cast him as leftist, you can cast him as centrist, or even as to the right of prevalent Democratic Party standards. But no matter how you assemble the puzzle, missing pieces always remain – and they're not the ones left in your hand. It's back to square one, you psychopundits.
It's been a while since anyone has wanted to be president as much as Mr. Obama did, or entered office with such grand goals. Yet this rushing stream of change we could believe in dwindled into the dank bog of The Health Care Reform Nobody Really Wanted. Of Mr. Obama's foreign policy much could also be said, but not by way of listing its successes.
A Republican president, then, in 2012? Rick Perry? Mitt Romney? Michele Bachmann? The harder you look, the less electable each seems. The election looms as a classic contest of a peculiarly lacklustre kind. Remember, you read it here first. On Nov. 6, 2012, resistible Republican force will meet movable Democratic object.
Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a distinguished fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.