Just ask them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/dowd-showtime-at-the-apollo.html?_r=1
The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantors new book, The Obamas, bristles with aggrievement and the rational presidents disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.
We disappointed them.
As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: I always told the voters, the question isnt whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether were ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.
They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
As Kantor reports, when the president met with Democratic members of Congress who had lost their seats in the midterms because of an incoherent White House economic and jobs strategy, he did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret. Jim Oberstar, who lost his long-held Minnesota perch, recalled Obamas saying, In the end, this is for the greater good of the country. ...
The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. Theyve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.
The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of the elite media protecting Barack Obama (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newts gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.
Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/dowd-showtime-at-the-apollo.html?_r=1