Jon Stewart mocks (among other things) Barack Obama’s re-election video. “How did we go from ‘yes we can’ to ‘you know, whatever’?” Stewart asks. The Comedy Central star has zeroed in on something real. The Obama campaign video is strange. Several of the Obama supporters featured in it are, as Stewart points out, suffering from ennui.
The stratospheric expectations of the 2008 campaign crashed a long time ago. They now look as silly and evanescent as an adolescent romance. Obama supporters are reduced to arguing that “there are so many things still on the table that need to be addressed”–and it’s supposed to follow, I guess, that Obama is the person to do it. What goes unmentioned in the video is why this far into the Obama administration the problems appear to be piling up rather than being cleared off the table.
