What happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing

Some moderates are surprised, but many life long Democrats see no problem with his behavior. The social wish list of the last 40 years is what they wanted, and he looked like he could do it, plus he was a 2-fer, a guy who could absolve their guilt for a history they didn't create. Most white liberals wanted him for his racial make-up, pure and simple. His politics was a plus. No white liberal could have defeated the Clinton machine with so little experience.

But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.

Norman Podhoretz: What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing. - WSJ.com