Malaise, anyone?

President Obama is now railing at the “apathy” of Democratic voters.

"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up," Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."

Yet in his attempt to light a fire under supporters, Obama comes across as fired up himself about how many backers fail to acknowledge the progress he sees. He said the glass-half-empty view among many progressive voters can be a debilitating force that distracts them from the real worry: Republicans. [emphasis mine]

Half-empty or half-full, Barry, even many Democrats have finally figured out that it’s still just a dribble glass.

Perhaps everybody’s feeling insufficiently bucked because of the high unemployment rate or the lack of real economic growth or the dawning awareness that your health-care plan is a costly disaster. Or maybe it’s the sky-high deficit and the uncontrolled spending. Or your Carter-like coddling of dictators. Or your racist Justice Department. Or your outrageous dog-in-the-manger attitude about border security (we, the feds, aren’t going to enforce immigration law, but you, Arizona, aren’t going to do it, either). Michelle’s spending sprees, the endless White House “galas”, the fancy vacations; it all adds up.

You have, though, in somewhat Bidenesque fashion, put your finger on a problem pertaining to the electorate at large: folks really weren’t serious when they elected you. Oh, many, if not most, must have thought they were, but in any objective sense, they couldn’t have been. A vote in favor of a junior senator who came up through the corrupt Chicago political machine, toting all the radical baggage of a lifetime of association with the likes of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, having exactly zero administrative experience, and holding himself out as a kind of Jesus without the indignity and pain - and divisive dogma! - of the cross…No, whatever motivated them, it wasn’t seriousness. Perhaps, ironically, it was a “hope against hope”, a desperately-cherished wish for a political miracle that, deep down, they knew could not possibly come true, but which, next to the unlovely and banal reality of the McCain alternative, caused them to throw caution to the wind.

And now they find they’ve just been pissing into it and, like sane, mature adults, have decided to stop.