Ross sums up:

Which in turn suggests that that far from being the man who will tell us what we need to hear, rather than what we want to hear, he’s a go-along-to-get-along figure, a man who accepts The Way Things Are and doesn’t rock the boat. In other words, that he’s just another politician.

All right, but to realise that all you would need to do is look at his preference for aligning himself with a consensus (rather than, as his hagiographers would have it, creating consensus on difficult issues), his voting record and the legislation he’s co-sponsored.  You can approve of his voting record and legislation, or you can reject it, but your response to it will break down very much along conventional left-right lines, because there is nothing unconventional in what he is offering.  Once you are urged to look at his substance, you find that there is nothing new or remarkable there.  The myth of Obama, Healer of Worlds, has ultimately been a disservice to Obama to the extent that no actual politician could live up to the billing he has been given, and so now that he has fallen short of some absurdly high standard we are supposed to castigate him for not being able to “transcend” his own community (because he isn’t supposed to be tied that closely to his community, and his perceived distance from it has been to his advantage).  Now that we find yet again that he is, in fact, a mortal man with conventional loyalties and not the ousiarch of this sphere, and we are supposed to be stunned and amazed.  I suppose my reaction has been guided in part by the fact that I have never believed the myth, so there has been no sudden disappointment of utterly unrealistic expectations.  Sometimes it helps to be a pessimist.