The Los Angeles Times compared the themes and tones of President Obama’s speeches in 2008 and now, again on the campaign trail but facing a very different set of challenges. What they discovered was both provocative and depressing:

“His message of national unity and reconciliation had been replaced by a stark warning against cynical Republican tactics, vague threats to America’s political system and the urgent need to keep the GOP marginalized. There was less hope, more fear…
Obama in Portland suggested that “foreign-controlled corporations” were bankrolling a “misleading, negative” ad campaign that serves Republicans, but offered no evidence.”We don’t know,” he said. Whereas his 2008 speech said that Americans needed to “start trusting each other again, start working together again,” he said at the Oregon Convention Center rally this week that even if Republicans cooperate more with the White House, they would be forced to “sit in the back seat.” Two years ago, he said Americans are “tired of a politics that’s all about tearing each other down.” On Wednesday, he painted a grim picture of life under Republican leadership: The chronically ill, the unemployed, the student who can’t afford college tuition — all would be cut “loose to fend for themselves.”

There is a thin line between fecklessness and adaptability, between perseverance and stubbornness. Many will defend the President’s abandonment of the aspirations be argued for as a candidate, saying that the harsh opposition of Republicans forced him to descend to their level. Yet the President knew, or should have known, that cultural change in Washington would be difficult, as all cultural changes are. The nation agreed that the objective was noble, important and right, and elected Obama because he convinced voters that he could be trusted to achieve that objective.

Now, after only two years, President Obama has rejected these 2008 goals in order to hold on to his threatened political power—exactly the motivations that have nurtured the toxic political climate that he, correctly, identified as a danger to the nation’s welfare. There are only a few possible explanations for this:

1. He never intended to change the culture in Washington, but recognized it as an effective campaign theme.
2. He naively believed the culture of Washington could be changed more easily and quickly than was  reasonable or possible, and didn’t have the skills or the fortitude to do what was necessary to achieve his objectives.
3. He no longer thinks the toxic partisanship in Washington is so bad, and has decided that “if you can’t beat ’em, join em.”
4. Cultural change in Washington is impossible.

Only one of these can be ruled out immediately, and that is #4. Of course cultural change is possible. The culture in Washington has changed and evolved many times, when there were leaders with the ability and the strength of character to re-mold it. Cultural  change may be impossible for Obama, but that is a different problem. When he ran for President, a relatively inexperienced legislator with no executive experience to speak of, he offered vision, values, and hope. Those assets were, at the time, sufficient to move a majority of Americans to make him their leader. What does he have to offer now, if those assets are gone? Fear? Cynicism? Divisive rhetoric?

If this is the real Barack Obama, then the 2008 version was a fraud. If that was the real Barack Obama, then his conduct now suggests that he did not possess the courage, determination and integrity we thought he did, and perhaps that he thought he did. Restoring trust in government and transcending partisanship requires sufficient strength of character to earn that trust by keeping pledges and sticking to values in the face of defeat, opposition, and frustration.

“How’s that hopey-changey thing working for ya?” a mocking Sarah Palin asked. Apparently not so well. But if Obama was going to abandon hope so easily, he shouldn’t have raised ours.