"Repairing the damage"

President Obama used a portion of his inaugural speech to back peddle on some of his more lofty campaign promises, which was really just the culmination of a two month long effort to "reduce expectations." Implicit in his speech was the idea that Bush's administration had made such an mess of things that it might take more than one term for Obama to get things right.

That put me in mind of this quote from the venerable Thomas Sowell:

A politician with good rhetorical skills can create a new Garden of Eden in people's minds, though only in their minds. However, that is sufficient, if that vision or illusion can be kept alive until election day, and its failure to materialize afterwards can be explained away by the obstruction of villains.

Do you see the pattern here? Unrealistic promises made during a two year campaign, sold to a credulous populace hungry for a fresh face in Washington with soaring rhetoric and faux passion, but in the end impossible to fulfill. What to do, what to do...

Easy! Preemptively blame the failure to bring about the promised liberal Utopia on Bush. Why not? No one has ever gone wrong in this country by blaming the reviled President Bush.

This is the Change we were looking for?