People wondered what the surprise might be

By mid-September 2010, people wondered what sort of surprise that Obama and the Democrats would spring to keep the Democrats in control of the House and Senate. Pretty clearly, they intended to do whatever it took to stay in power. For one thing, they did not want to risk any investigations into the events of 2009 and 2010. They also did not want to give anyone the chance to repeal what they had put in place through legislation. What would Obama do, suspend the constitution?

The country had lost confidence in President Obama

Looking back, with the perspective of time, we should not have been surprised that the country lost confidence in President Obama by July 2010. He had been a man of little experience and an extreme agenda that he was intent on implementing. As as series of important things progressively worsened, the prospect for the future for the president seemed quite grim. Despite the Obama cheerleaders, normal people viewed the economy as getting worse, not recovering. They viewed his policies as increasing the difficulties, not easing them. The next question was how the election in November 2010 would go for the president and his party. The insiders thought that the president secretly wanted his party to lose, so that he would be able to blame Republicans in the House and Senate for the country's woes.

Looking back on early February 2010

What we see when we re-examine what happened in late January to early February 2010, the administration of Barack Obama was descending into chaos. Obama seemed to be bent on implementing such an unpopular agenda that the Democrats would be voted out of office in considerable numbers in November 2010 and he would not be re-elected in 2012, if he dared to run again.

A test of President Obama's popularity?

Prior to the elections in early November 2009, the buzz was all about whether the elections would go with or against President Obama. In the matter of just over nine months, he had rapid change of fortune. The opinions had changed from overwhelming popularity to something bordering on contempt. Everyone waited for the outcome of the election. If the Democrats did well, they would spin the election as an affirmative vote on President Obama's performance. If the Republicans did well, the Democrats would spin the election as being determined by local issues.

Unencumbered

At the nine month point in the Obama presidency, his popularity was at a low point. President Obama and his minions in Congress, had proceeded without concern about whether their policies either worked or were popular. Being unencumbered by such concerns, they were liberated from much of the conventional politics. They had blithely implemented the laundry list of progressive policy positions that were well-known to insiders in the circle of leftist policy theorists. The possible flaw in this strategy is that they seem to have not considered that they could lose control of Congress after the 2010 elections and lose the presidency in the 2012 elections. They had bet the farm that the Republicans were so hapless as to be incapable of opposing them.

Obama unmasked

By the fall of 2009, the American people were learning just who they had elected to the Presidency of the United States in 2008. Obama had showed himself to be a radical leftist with little experience. He was good at producing happy talk but was short on ideas or results. That revelation was disappointing to everyone, as even his opponents had hoped that he would have a chance at success. After all, everyone would benefit by positive results, even if you disagreed with Obama's political philosophy. Obama continued to benefit by the equal lack of solutions and political savvy on the Republican side.

Obama starts using Richard Nixon's playbook from 1972 and 1973

There were observers who were surprised when President Obama started using Richard Nixon's playbook from 1972 and 1973. They should not have been surprised, because the methods used by Nixon to do research about the opposition and to use organized force to discourage demonstrations. Nixon used union thugs and so that was a natural group for Obama to use as well. In Obama's case, he use the SEIU membership to pummel the "Tea Party" demonstrators against "Health Care Reform" (a plan to nationalize the health care system and to ultimately implement socialized medicine).