The Messiah Delusion

James Surowieki assesses Obama's first year and I couldn't agree more:

Ultimately, I think Obama’s real problem has been a familiar one, namely that, inadvertently or not, he overpromised and necessarily underdelivered. This is a problem, in some sense, that all presidents run into, since voters tend to attribute to the President far more power over the economy than he actually has. But the problem was exacerbated in Obama’s case by the rhetoric of his campaign“yes, we can” sounds great, but it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to recover from the bursting of an eight-trillion-dollar housing bubble and the hopes that people placed in him.

I never understood the somewhat messianic qualities that certain voters ascribed to him: Obama has been exactly the kind of President I expected him to be (and the kind of President I hoped he would be), namely rational, pragmatic, thoughtful, and even-tempered. But clearly many voterseven, oddly enough, some of those who didn’t vote for himexpected a miracle worker. When they got a problem-solver instead, one with little authority over Congressional Democrats and no authority at all over obstructionist Republicans, they were disappointed.

Still, I don’t know that there was a way to avoid thiscampaigning is, to some extent, always a matter of getting people to believe you'll make more of a difference than you actually can. And I don't think people’s disappointment should obscure what has been accomplished: if you had told people in March of last year, when predictions of complete doom were rampant, that the economy would be growing at a four-per-cent clip in the first quarter of 2010, few would have believed you. As has been pointed out numerous times, “Bad as things are, they would have been much worse without me,” isn’t exactly inspiring. That doesn’t make it any less true.