wow.

I'm really tempted to say "I told you so" once again, because 2 years ago I did.  But I won't.  Even though I could.

Man, was that a big swing, though!  And at all levels of government, from the feds down to the local dog catcher.  680 seats in all, nation wide, at all levels, were won by Rs over Ds.  That's a lot.  It's unprecedented, even.

That's what happens when people who were sold "hope and change" realize that it was all just smoke and mirrors.  Yup, that guy with all the high rhetoric was inexperienced, unproven, untested, and, even worse, unable.  It didn't take him long to go from "we" meaning everyone, a vast and broad coalition that included the vast middle ground of the electorate to "we", meaning just the left and especially the very left of the left.

But the good news is that all is not lost.  The President still has a chance to reclaim the visionary mantle he used to pull the wool over everyone's eyes 7 years ago at the DNC and 3 years ago during the presidential campaign.  There's still a chance, and if he can reclaim that mantle he'll win a second term with a resounding landslide victory over whatever sacrificial goat is tossed up to lose to him.

But for the first time in 2 years I'm skeptical of whether or not he CAN pull off the victory in 2012 in the same way he did it in 2008.  And I say that only because for the last 2 years he's been governing as a bitterly partisan polarizing leftist.  He's replaced the "there is no blue state America and red state America, but only America" with "us versus them" rhetoric.  Sure, there were hints of it before, but it could be dismissed as just random misspeaking and not indicative of his true ideology.  But now?  I'm not so sure the "they cling to their guns and bibles" blast can be dismissed so easily, now that we see how he's actually prone to govern.

It'll be interesting to see how the next campaign goes.  It'll be interesting to see if he can regain the visionary spark that convinced a vast swath of the electorate that "We are the ones we've been waiting for!"  It would be nice if he could.  It would be nice if, for the next 2 years at least, he actually governed like he campaigned.  It would be nice...  but I'm skeptical.  But, then again, I've been skeptical since the beginning.