One of the way-great disappointments in US history is Barack Obama, growing from ‘yes, we can’ to ‘no way’ in the space of a finger snap.
Most likely, a great reason for the depressed anxiety of US peoples right now is a fevered disillusionment with somebody who was supposed to put the country back on track — sucks to be us.

Early on I felt a hint: Somehow that three-pointer on a basketball court in Kuwait during the summer of 2008 popped a happy vein — see the video here — and from that point on I realized that somehow Obama was all theater, more actor than playwright with all the right moves to impress and ‘wow’ an audience.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, I took a lot of flak when talking about the basketball shot’s momentous meaning, a lot of people just calling me an asshole.
One of my grown daughters actually became involved with Obama’s campaign — losing her job in Texas due to a Obama bumper-sticker on her car — and she most-definitely did not want to hear my shit. (She is now sick of politics).
And the intuition became near fact when in December 2008 Obama named two putrid peas in a pod as part of his administration — this was the beginning to the total bullshit.

Frank Rich, via a long piece last week in New York magazine, writes of this failure and how US peoples are coping with such an enormous let down.
A few snips:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers.
Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe.
Time may heal most wounds, but not these.
Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims.
As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”
After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun.
After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail.
But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions).
As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers.
The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes.
You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky “Fabulous Fab” Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else.
It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.
…
The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind.
No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished.
He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it?
All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street” — an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”
…
He stocked his administration with brilliant personnel linked to the bubble: liberals, and especially Ivy League liberals.
Nearly three years on, they have taken a toll both on the White House’s image and its policies.
Obama arrives at his reelection campaign not merely with a weak performance on Wall Street crime enforcement and reform but also with a scattershot record (at best) of focusing on the main concern of Main Street: joblessness.
One is a consequence of the other.
His failure to push back against the financial sector, sparing it any responsibility for the economy it tanked, empowered it to roll over his agenda with its own.
He has come across as favoring the financial elite over the stranded middle class even if, in his heart of hearts, he does not.
…
The alternative is a failure of historic proportions.
Those who gamed the economy to near devastation — so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth.
Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Read the whole piece, it connects the dots to failure and illusion.
And yes, we be in deep shit.