Paul Waldman on the left’s discovery that Obama is not the progressive they fell in love with:
Was this disillusionment inevitable? “Inevitable” might be a strong word, but the answer is: pretty much, yes. That isn’t an excuse for Obama’s failures. Just as to be fair we have to give him credit for what he has achieved — especially health-care reform, which seemed impossible for so long — we have to hold him responsible for what he’s done wrong, from the embrace of so much of the Bush administration’s policies on civil liberties to his alarmingly tepid commitment to reproductive rights. But as Eric Alterman writes, “The system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.”