The last two days I got a lot of hysterically angry mail about a rather pedestrian, empirical observation the other day that Obama was in a near-meltdown in his third week of governance. I pointed to Obama’s trashing-then-adopting the Bush security plan (FISA, Patriot Act, renditions, Iraq, sorta of Guantanamo), the serial cabinet appointee implosions, the mockery of our tax laws, the embarrassing provisions of the $1 trillion “stimulus”, the lobbyist exceptions to the no-lobbyist policy, the unfortunate al Arabiya interview, and the McClellanesque performances of Robert Gibbs.

But I think, nonetheless, the near-meltdown description is accurate (poll drops suggest as much) and serious. It is largely a logical dividend of Obama’s unnecessary, but apparently Pavlovian, tendency to preface every issue with (1) Bush et al. did this to us, and (2) I am bringing historic change never before seen. Then with almost mathematical regularity, we wait about 24 hours and learn that Obama either adopts many of Bush’s policies, or in policy and appointments (whether Clintonites or tax dodgers and lobbyists) proves about the same old, same old that we expect from Washington.

If Obama will just turn down the saintly ethical rhetoric and forget about Bush, then his all-too-human slips won’t be seen as all that bad, given our quite low expectations of contemporary politicians; and in humble fashion he will right things and get on with governance.

For two years the media and the Left transmogrified a bright and talented, though inexperienced, Chicago pol (who needed at least a half-decade of seasoning in the Senate) into some sort of divine totem in which they could invest all their hopes and seek penance for all their purported sins. They are now learning in just 15 days that scoring points against George Bush on the campaign trail and offering soaring platitudes with Reverend Wright cadences were not the same as governing the United States. In the same hysterical fashion that many hated George Bush, so they deified Barack Obama–and I expect, when disappointed, will begin to turn on the fallen prophet Obama as well.

Oddly, many of us who did not vote for him will give him praise and support when he does things that we think are sensible and help the country (like the welcome executive pay caps for those once-bold capitalists who wanted safe socialism on their way down).

A final thought. There are tens of thousands of talented liberals and moderates outside the Clinton circle and the retread politicians and lobbyists in DC. Historians will soon wonder why the radical hope and change candidate on the day after the election simply adopted as his own the entrenched Democratic DC elite whole hog–with all their egalitarian rhetoric serving as very flimsy cover for tax dodging, lobbying, and Wall Street-like tastes. It was quite astounding really–and not altogether necessary.