The magic is gone: The end of Hopenchange

As The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein noted after the speech, a vote for the president’s meager agenda is effectively a vote for a kind of “return to normalcy” after the intense perturbations of the last four years. Clinton’s high-profile convention role was appropriate, in a sense, because in the best-case scenario an Obama second term would return us to the legislative landscape of the late 1990s — an era of small ball and incrementalism and modest forms of bipartisanship, in which politicians of both parties took credit for positive developments that they didn’t actually control.

But we are not in the late 1990s anymore. There is nothing remotely “normal” about the unemployment rate we’re enduring, or the long-term deficits we face, or the fact that the American birthrate has dropped below replacement level over the last five years. Or alternatively, if this is the new normal, then it’s a normalcy that both citizens and politicians should aspire to swiftly leave behind…

But whatever happens in November, the president’s own words have given us fair warning: We face a continuing crisis, and the liberalism of Barack Obama is no longer equal to the task.