Still waiting for Superman

Slate's David Weigel reports that "optimistic desperation" pervades the Aspen Ideas Festival, a week-long summer camp for "insufferable elites," as Salon put it. It seems everyone is disappointed in President Obama.

"There's desperation where there used to be hope. No one here still believes Obama can engineer great change. He's what we've got; he's offering more than the Republicans. The most realistic ideas about what can be done politically are predicated on what Washington will be forced to do by crisis," Weigel writes.

What gets lost in translation is that Washington has always operated by crisis. Granted, I doubt the Founders would approve of today's gratuitous gridlock. But let's not forget that they deliberately fashioned this Republic in a manner that makes change difficult. They were rightly concerned about what Jefferson described as "frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions." The messier the fight in a democracy, the better the resulting legislation. And for the most part, it worked.

Obama's mistake in 2008 was a presumption that Republicans, too, were swept up in the "hope and change" tsunami he rode into the White House. Surely, he thought, they would put country ahead of politics -- at least until we had backed away from the economic abyss. Instead, the GOP did the opposite. They gleefully torched his extended olive branch and then dedicated themselves to "pay any price, bear any burden" in undermining him at every turn. The nation be damned. So much for the Brave New World of change. The left, particularly its gullible and needy elite, has been whining ever since. Clueless, they still pine for Superman and can't understand why Obama won't use his magic powers to make it all better.

It always takes any new president a few years to learn the ways of Washington. Obama has been duly schooled (not without a lot of hard knocks). He gets it now. It may help explain his new feistiness. In any event, Obama is no longer the presidential rookie who believes "duty, honor, country" has any real meaning to today's right. He has trimmed his sails accordingly. And you can bet he'll be packing heat in any future knife fight. The left will get its money worth, but not quite yet. Barring a national emergency, expect Obama to keep his superhero cape packed until his second term. That's when those leaps in a single bound will really begin.