Paul Krugman wrote (NYTimes, November 11, 2010):

… the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

My take comes close to a liberal heresy…namely, that Obama is a product of ‘affirmative action,’ boosted and carried along through Harvard, etc., as a black face for the white system…. He never had to deal with outright racism or poverty in any significant way as a personal struggle. I can’t imagine what he did as a ‘community organizer’; my experience with that (in late 1960s New Haven especially) brought me close to people who had a strong capacity to confront the world as they find it. I have seen a Republican suggestion that Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky; this is bullshit, as anyone familiar with Alinsky’s methods knows. Alinsky was in-your-face; Obama is Stepin Fetchit by comparison….

Obama made a mistake in bringing Summers and Geithner into the administration, both culprits in the banking debacle; next, his mistake was to dump $$ into the banks w/o taking control of them (even George Soros said as much in an article in the November 11, 2010, NY Review of Books); after that, he was wrong to put aside calls for investigations into Bush malpractices (including torture and Iraq ‘intelligence’ manipulation)…. on all fronts, his mandate to ‘change’ things would have supported reviews of what was to be changed, i.e., what had been done to get into these various messes. By not uncovering the deep mess, he empowered the right-wing nuts by leaving their discourse unchallenged…. and they, sensing his weakness to confront, surged ahead.