A week or two ago on his show, Bill Maher startled some by saying that he wished Barack Obama would take a little more after George W. Bush in one regard: That attitude of "I won the election so I'm going to ram through my agenda and if the losers don't like it…well, screw them." The Bush administration always had that annoying view that since they'd ostensibly won a hair more than 50% of the vote, they were entitled to their way 100% of the time. Maher said he wished Obama would be more aggressive in the same way about pushing his own legislation and policies.
I'm drifting ever-so-cautiously towards the same viewpoint. I still have the hope, naive as it may someday feel, that what Obama's doing is being pragmatic about working with the opposition, horse-trading his way to a more effective coalition. If he wants a second term, we'll have to be able to see that he delivered most of what he promised and made it really work this way. Elected officials always on some level disappoint those who put them in office and there's something about Obama that makes me feel that the folks who voted for him will be less forgiving than the ones who voted for Bush were for the guy they picked.
For now, I look at what seem like reversals of rhetoric — hedging on eliminating "Don't ask, don't tell," suppressing torture pics, allowing infinite detention and (now) using signing statements to overrule Congress — and I have to wonder. And content myself that even if the worst is true, he's still a lot better than the guy he replaced.