Michael Sherer, over at Swampland, wrote a piece titled "Five Ways Obama Went Wrong." Then, he wrote a follow-up called "Swampland Responds: What Went Wrong for Obama," which used reader comments from his previous post.

It's very interesting stuff. Some great insights.

Charles Krauthhammer, on Fox, loves apocalyptic hyperbole. He's prone to statements like: "If this doesn't pass, Obama's presidency is over."

We're hearing a lot of nonsense like that in relation to Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts. I, for the record, am delighted that Brown won and broke the super-majority. I'm tickled pink. I'm disgusted with the way healthcare reform has gone.

But after just one year, don't you think it's a bit early to write Barack Obama's obituary? As it was with Bill Clinton?

A number of good things have happened under Obama's presidency, many things which I'm very pleased about (but which don't necessarily get much attention). But the healthcare mess and deficit spending overshadow everything.

I'm hoping Obama can get back on track with some of the ideals expressed in his campaign and in "The Audacity of Hope" (a book I loved). I'm not confident he will, and in my cynicism not even confident those were heart-felt ideals. But it's okay to hope. In two years, the gloom being expressed right now could be a distant memory. He's still in the early days of his presidency.

I suspect Obama's doing a lot of soul-searching right now, and realizes he got caught up in the Washington game in a rollercoaster year of crises. In his deep desire to pass healthcare reform, he allowed an "ends justify the means" mentality to rule, which inserted what is essentially blackmail and corruption into the package. Either he never intended to fulfill the ideals of his campaign (Dick Cheney: "We will not be bound by the things we had to say during the campaign"), or Reality stampeded him away from those ideals.

I'd love to seem him, in his State of the Union Address, say, "The deals made in the quest for universal healthcare are wrong, should never have been allowed. So I'm calling on Congress to scrap what it's done so far, and start over. We still need healthcare reform. But we need to do it right."

That'll never happen, I realize. But it would restore some confidence on my part. And I do believe he's a person of ideals, whose heart is to be a different kind of politician. There's still time to resurrect that potentially transformational person, though a whole lot of damage has been done. 

I might be wrong on that--I've been burned so many times by earnest-sounding politicians, most recently GW Bush, that I'm terribly cynical--but it's what I saw in "The Audacity of Hope," which shows a man who has thought deeply about a whole lot of issues. So though I'm disappointed right now, even gloomy, I cling to a few tablespoons of hope.