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Obama didn’t win with the promise of anything specific. He won as a rejection to George W. Bush’s domestic failures, as follows.

1) The WoT, in the minds of the American public, needed and needs to be fought in other countries, not the USA. The public were very appalled and resentful of much of the Patriot Act legislation, which they saw to be unnecessary, intrusive and offensive.

2) He raised the festering issue of illegal aliens, but without a clear and concise plan for dealing with the problem. Instead, every perfidious scoundrel profiting from illegal aliens got their hand into the mix, with the end result of aggravating everyone and accomplishing too little, too late.

3) President Bush adopted a policy in his first term, not seen since intermittently in the late 19th Century, of letting congress run the country. The Republican congress acted without discipline and with disgusting greed, violating any fiscal responsibility. As leader of that party, he should have made them toe the line. That congress was punished as a warning to Bush, but he still did not intervene with the Democrat congress to make them orderly houses. At the same time, Bush continued and took the unconstitutional practice of the Presidential Signing Statement to new heights.

4) President Bush refused to fight back, either in his own behalf, on behalf of Republicans and conservatives, or even the American people, except with the pursuit of the wars. He refused to engage in the bare knuckle political fighting that has to be done with scoundrels to keep them in their place. Pelosi and Reed and their ilk, on the other hand, kept up a continual barrage of scurrilous attacks against him.

The bottom line is that President Bush should have been exclusively a war president, and directed Dick Cheney to keep the domestic house in order, if he was too busy.