At the start of his first term, a cult-like following had already developed among the intellectual and media elite. It was the dawn of a new age, marked by exuberant anticipation of justice, fairness, equality, peace, and sea-to-shining-sea happiness, all of it predicted as a certainty once you consider the sheer intelligence, erudition, and good intentions of the great man.

Salon sums up the Obama era thusly:

Obama campaigned on hope in 2008 and it helped turn out a large and diverse electorate, excited at the idea that this charming man who could be the hero of a feel-good movie would give us our happy ending. He spent the next years cultivating that image….. through it all, he radiated hope and racked up some impressive victories — passing universal health care legislation, killing Osama bin Laden, getting the federal bureaucracy largely working as it should again — that justified his heroic image.

Now two months following the greatest political upheaval most of us will ever witness, we are seeing the dawning of a new reality: Obama failed. The supposed successes such as the Affordable Care Act have become a handful of dust, and we are left with a huge amount of executive orders and signed legislation that seem destined for repeal.