During the presidential primaries, my full backing was behind Edwards. (This was before all his personal shit hit the fan.) But everybody was enthralled with Clinton and Obama. But I kept telling myself, naively, that all this would just flush itself out and people would open their ears.
I kept saying, 'No, this is all just the media and people looking at the newness of possible contenders for the presidency.' I kept thinking that all of this was going to blow over and that it was going to actually come back to being three people in a race - not two.
It seemed to me that the media played this off as a novelty act. And I actually think they did.
Obama began to pull ahead, and I still thought (wishfully, beyond any real hope) that he would fall by the wayside. I would tell my friends that I thought he was just a rock star. And that was it. I liked him, but I didn't think that he was the guy. (What about Clinton, you ask? I just never really liked her as a candidate. She never really caught me.)
But then Edwards really fell, and the choice was only two. To me, at that time, the only choice was Obama. and I began to hang all my hopes (no puns intended) on him getting to the presidency.
His inauguration speech killed me. I was sure that we had a guy who would grab the country by the reigns, shove the Regan ghost into the ditch and do what needed to be done.
And few weeks in, I was back into my Edwards train of thought of wishful thinking. All I had to do was to start listening to Helen Thomas - the one person whom I thought might give him a bit of leeway.
He didn't undo much of the disturbing destruction of habeus corpus that Bush had put in place. We found he didn't get rid of many of the black sites that he had railed against. Guantanamo... Well, Guantanamo...
I know that many people rail against me for my losing patience with him. But especially when the White House comes out and rails against the "Professional Left", and refuses to get in the ditches to fight, gives in to a story that originally comes out of an extreme right-wing blogger, picked up as fact by FOX News about Shirley Sherrod and fires her... My head spins after a year-plus.
Granted, the Democrats have a habit of infighting and drawing blood on each other, while the Republicans grow their "I Don't Care About You" grins across their mouths and march in lockstep. But we had the numbers and from day one if Obama jumped in and pushed forward on health care, on a decent stimulus package, on financial reform, it might have not gone through so watered down.
The political capital was there to spend, and he should have pushed into it immediately. Kieth Olbermann was right on his special comment about the White House's view on the "Professional Left."
But, hindsight is 20/20.
Maybe "Hope" is nothing more than wishful thinking.
And maybe I was right the first time. Maybe he was just a "rock star."