Yes, We Can't

Four years ago the rhetoric soared and the promises were intoxicating. The sick would be cared for, the oceans would reverse their rise, the planet would heal, and peace would fill the planet. It was the age of Aquarius. The millenial kingdom was at hand.

That was then. Now the president seems at almost every turn to be telling us that the economy was worse than he thought, the Republicans are more recalcitrant than he expected, the world is more complex than he knew. There are limits to what he can do. The change he promised us, well, it can't actually be effected from inside Washington.

It's hard to believe that a president whose party controlled both houses of the legislature for the first two years of his administration and who has been blessed with an obsequious media couldn't accomplish whatever he really wanted to accomplish. Nonetheless, "Yes we can" has in less than four years morphed into "No, I can't, but I deserve four more years anyway."

Mr. Obama's admission of failure reminds me of the man in a cynical limerick I heard a number of years ago that goes like this:

They showed him the thing

that couldn't be done,

and with a smile he got right

to it.

He tackled the thing that

couldn't be done,

and found out he couldn't do it.