The best thing Barack Obama had going for him in 2008 was the near total dearth of a public record. It is not that there was no such record. Obama had been a professional rabble-rouser—which is to say a “community organizer” in the Saul Alinsky mold, who made common cause with revolutionary Leftists. Later, when he decided to seek public office, his coming-out party was held in the living room of two former Weather Underground terrorists. Still, Obama’s pre-presidential political career was meager and distinguished only by his propensity to vote “present” rather than take accountable stands.

With the press bleaching away his radical roots and studiously indifferent to such basic information as his upbringing, education, and résumé (or lack of same), the candidate was elusively depicted as a “pragmatic centrist.” In effect, he was a blank screen and “Hope and Change” was the projector portraying a glorious mirage of all that is good and right for the masses. Or, at least, good and left—a post-partisan, post-racial, globally loved America where the government provides for your every need, yet balances the budget while taxing only a handful of rich Republicans. The masses fell for it.

They did not fall for it in 2010. By then, in lieu of Hope, we’d had two years of Change—the realityof Obama. His party lost control of Congress and of state and municipal governments across the country. This historic electoral “shellacking,” as the president memorably called it, had many causes, but