We saw this first during the primary campaign in late 2007 and the first half of 2008, where the dueling factions supporting either Senator Obama, Senator Clinton or even Senator Edwards felt it necessary to demonize the candidates they did not support. One candidate was a "war monger," another was unelectable and shallow, and so on and so forth.

The idea that a unified party finding a way to support a single candidate and to try to get him or her elected seemed quite out of reach. To some people, indeed, the idea that one might support a different candidate than the one he first supported seemed somehow dishonest or a betrayl of important beliefs, though to others, this blogger included, the idea was to elect someone---not just anyone but either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton.

Somehow we pulled it together, after all. President Bush surely helped; Governor Palin helped, too. May these continue to be their lasting contributions to this republic.

Those who saw their support for a particular candidate to be more important than the election of a Democrat always seemed to be a problem. The cult of personality, the idea that ones vote could only go to a candidate who agreed with the voter on every issue imaginable (could a Cubs fan vote for a White Sox fan? Could someone who opposed the war in Iraq ever forgive a candidate who voted in support of the resolution which permitted the use of force?), was likely to result in the election of a Democrat, if at all, by people who would quickly lose interest if the new President did not usher in an era radically different than the political one we were in.

A divided country united only in the view that President Bush was incompetent, though, is not going to embrace the abrupt return to embrace the New Deal foundations which The Great Reagan and his acolytes all but wrecked in 1980. It was not going to adopt the Daily Kos view about war criminals, illegal wars, the use of terror to scare an electorate and so forth, simply because the presidency of George Bush required the election of President Obama.

That is why it was imperative that the new president use the giddy optimism to get what could be gotten in the first hundred days or so. In substantial measure, that happened even with a Loyal Opposition simply turning its back on the new president and simply voting against whatever the president supported, and a new view of the filibuster as simply requiring a super-majority for any piece of legislation to pass the Senate. Still, as Rachel Maddow detailed it a few weeks back, with compromises even to get the votes of Democrats which we wish were unnecessary, it was as successful a first year plus as could reasonably be imagined and, given the nightmare of the past eight years, one would think it would be enough to cause those who so wanted change two years ago to press ahead for more in the next session of Congress.

Instead, the press and broadcasters, always eager to tear down whatever they think they have created, aided and abetted the sense of a government that has failed by not being able to undo so much damage in so short a period of time. Instead of the young people stimulated by a presidential candidate to push him into the White House, we get this report of "disillusioned" students either uniterested in voting or even in supporting Republicans and an electorate well described by Eugene Robinson as spoiled brats.

People who could not bring themselves to vote for Vice President Gore, because he was stiff, or for Senator Kerry, because he likes windsurfing, complained bitterly about President Bush, but those complaints fall on deaf ears. The reasons people do not want to support democratic members of Congress and are willing to see John Boehner as Speaker and a rerun of the subpoena happy nonsense that led to the impeachment of President Clinton (a diversion at least as responsible for many of our current problems, as anything else), should not be heard to complain at what we will have to endure.

The posts under this name which appeared just before and shortly after the Great Day of Election worried that the election of President Obama owed more to President Bush and his post-Katrina discovered failings than anything else and that the transformation of a presidential candidate into a celebrity would work against any long term change in the Reagan dominated thinking that continues to pass for political thought in this country.

It is quite sad, and not just a little scary, that this prognostication has come true.