President Obama won—twice—and then didn’t live up to anybody’s expectations, including his own.

What do you do? Well, if you’re Ezra Klein and a coterie of inflexibly progressive pundits, you repurpose an attack used against President George W. Bush’s bombastic approach to geopolitics. You call anybody who questions Obama’s leadership style a Green Lanternist. In a post for Vox stretching beyond 2,500 words, Klein makes his case against Obama critics.

“Presidents consistently overpromise and underdeliver,” he begins, a fair start. Surely, the editor-in-chief of Vox is going to make the obvious point that presidents and presidential candidates should know enough about the political process (including the limits on the executive branch) to avoid such a breach of trust.

Klein is a data guy. He must know that the public’s faith in government and politics is on a decades-long slide, a dangerous trend due in no small part to the fact that candidates make promises they know they can’t keep. In Washington, we call it pandering. In the rest of the country, it’s called a lie. Klein yawns.