Duh - how did this happen? Duh...

The logical end-result the the "soft bigotry of low expectations:"

Well-connected Democrats are complaining that the Obama political operation since the 2008 campaign has been more clumsy than clever.

Obama’s been rebuffed by would-have-been top-tier Senate candidates in states — North Carolina and Illinois — where Democrats now face an uphill fight this fall.

House Democrats lost a special election in the liberal Hawaii district Obama grew up in, and they have griped that the president didn't do more to help ease one of the candidates out.

And the White House failed to head off bitter Senate primaries for three Democratic-held Senate seats — in Arkansas, Colorado and Pennsylvania — that Republicans could snatch away this fall. Last fall, Obama vacillated on how much to help Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia — he worked hard in one case and kept his distance in another — and the party was routed in both instances.

One senior House Democrat said it is baffling "how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics" — a phrasing nearly identical to that of a second veteran House Democrat who expressed the same sentiment.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand famously said that "contradictions do not exist. When you are faced with what you believe is a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." I don't think that that's correct in every single possible situation, but I think it is here. The premise that's wrong is that the Obama campaign was "so good at campaigning." The fact is that he gaffed and blundered all over the campaign trail, all over God's creation, and was dragged across the finish line by the most biased mainstream press operation in history. A press corps that was enamored of every move he made.

There was no background checking, no pushback on the things he said that were clearly false, no attempt whatsoever to "vet" him as a potential chief executive. It was obvious from day one that he had done absolutely nothing in his life to qualify him for the position that he now holds, but the people who present the campaign story to the country weren't interested in that, either. The inability to speak off the cuff - ignored. The vacuousness of the rhetoric - ignored. The hard left voting record - ignored. The radical friends - ignored. The lack of any kind of managerial experience - ignored. The corrupt bargains for his housing and Michelle's job - ignored. The press had room in their dispatches for one Hero - Barack, the ONE - and one villain - Sarah Palin. And that was the storyline. He won the election not because he ran a great campaign, but because his campaign was, and was going to be, called great no matter what he did. He was the "Great Black Hope," and once he became a viable candidate, he was going to win regardless of what happened.