Although I’m somewhat late in posting this, here is an excellent passage from Megan McArdle, pondering the future of the Democratic Party:

I was talking to a libertarian friend yesterday who is a professor in the midwest, and we were marvelling at just how delusional many Obama voters seem to have been about what he was going to accomplish.  Don’t get me wrong–I certainly don’t approve of everything Obama has done.  But the guy got elected to be president of the United States, not Prime Minister of Sweden.  Anyone who seriously entertained the notion that the procedural obstacles to enacting legislation in the United States would suddenly fall away–along with the essentially center-right politics of the American voter–is probably not mature enough to be driving.

I should note that McArdle often wrote approvingly of Barack Obama during the 2008 election. As someone who was deeply troubled by the fanaticism of many Obama supporters (especially here in Chicago) and the cult-like belief in “Hope” and “Change”, I should say “I told you so”, but that would be rude. Instead, I will say that I think President Obama is doing about as well as could reasonably have been expected given the problems he inherited from the Bush administration and the constraints of the office. In fact, my opinion of Obama is higher today than on election night last year, because of the many highly competent moderates he appointed or retained in crucial economic and national security posts. But as the passage quoted above illustrates, the problem is that the expectations placed on Obama going into his presidency weren’t reasonable, and the Democrats must now re-acclimate themselves to political reality.