I have been drifting away from DailyKos in recent months, for a variety of reasons. But when I do read I find a real antipathy towards those who express that they don't buy the Obama's magic jujitsu argument, and instead think things are actually not very good.
Financial Bailout
Stimulus Package
Health Care
This Presidency is going very wrong very early in ways that could be very hard to come back from. The argument "better than the other guys" is not good enough - it only gives you a shot at temporarily replacing the other guys. When you don't give people enough of a change and the other guys are ruthless people will give the other guys a shot again. And that's where I don't think Americans take seriously the threat of fascism - because that is, quite literally, what the rump of the Republican party and its most active operatives, represent today.
Everything that comes out shows that the Financial rescues were a wholesale regulatory capture of the US government benefiting people who are screwing every other American all day, every day, and looting the treasury. This is something he and the team he put together have done. Their approach has fixed nothing more than token gestures and the end result is that people continue to be screwed - except now they associate his administration more and more with that.
The stimulus package was a joke. Watered down to the degree it was less money than most sensible economists believed necessary and most of it actually went to propping up collapses in other areas of government, not additional economic stimulus. All evidence is that this has given us a temporary uptick and we're in for a really rough downturn again, something that will enable the right wing to place the blame for your woes at the Obama/Democratic door.
Health Care reform was always going to be a hard slog, but they started from a position that might have been a reasonable end-result middle ground compromise, so the only place they could go was to make it a worse and worse bill. What's emerging is going to do little, and discredit future efforts to give Americans what every other citizen of a developed nation (and some developing nations) have as a fundamental right.
We cannot afford this to be a failed Presidency and quickly flip things back to a Republican party where it is today. The idea that they cannot get a plurality of the vote from here is wishful thinking. The idea that they even need a genuine plurality rather than merely close enough to steal is dangerous.
When I first married an American she commented on how Europeans seem to reference Hitler, Nazis and fascism a lot. I think it's because the consequences were so serious and still so fresh in memory in my parents generation and of course my grandparents generation who fought against them. We take it seriously because it happens with scary simplicity.
This country is littered with police forces who see themselves as freed to act like third world enforcers. We have huge swathes of the country populated by intolerant religious extremists who are happy to commit violence to get what they want. There are politicians actively egging this on and happy to benefit from their work. And we have a propaganda system actively engaged with by large numbers of Americans, and forced into public arenas all over the country (have you seen how many places have Fox News playing even today!).
So yeah, I am pissed off with Obama. Pissed off every time my bank nails me with stupid charges after stealing my tax money. Pissed off when I realise that I am going to be stuck for decades with this useless mess of a healthcare system. Pissed off when I realise that we're probably heading for an administration that will make the Bush years seem like a time of openness and happiness - when I am going to probably have to uproot from the place that I have chosen to make home (where I love to live) and head back to cold miserable England just to escape some of the consequences of that.
I just don't buy this jujitsu master argument. Wish I could.
[Edit: to clarify a potential misunderstanding - I am not saying the Obama administration will make us wish back nostalgically for the Bush years, I am saying the next Republican administration is likely to make the Bush years seem quite gentle and constitutionally sound]