The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto thinks Democrats and liberals are bracing for the de-election of President Obama in 13 months:

[HotAir.com’s Howard] Portnoy observes: “What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to ‘fundamentally transform America’ is on the verge of being unelected.”

We’d go a step further. Not only does Obama’s re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both.

Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics–the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson.

ObamaCare proved a political fiasco, showing that there are limits to Americans’ willingness to tolerate the expansion of the welfare state. Because most provisions have not yet taken effect, the policy disaster is delayed and may be averted if either Congress repeals it in 2013 or the Supreme Court strikes it down as unconstitutional next year. The latter case would mark a huge legal defeat for liberalism. It would be the first time since the New Deal that the court has recognized a serious limitation on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

Even something as small as Bank of America’s recently announced $5-a-month debit-card fee is liberal policy failure. The fee is intended to recoup money lost by price controls on merchant fees included in last year’s Dodd-Frank law.

The power of unions has diminished, with Wisconsin, the first state to establish so-called collective bargaining for government employees, having abolished it. “Card check,” which would have enabled unions to take over workplaces without approval by secret ballot, couldn’t even get past a Democratic Congress. Neither could “cap and trade,” the administration’s plan to combat global warming–a phenomenon increasingly many Americans suspect is a hoax.

The administration’s only major success has been in the area of terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, and long may they rot. But their deaths were not the result of progressive liberal policies. Except in the area of interrogation, the current administration has largely kept its predecessor’s antiterror policies, albeit often reluctantly. …

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons–but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown.

This is similar to the strange narrative that suggests that Obama is clinically depressed, reported a month ago by Gawker:

We hear the New York Times is looking into whether it’s all starting to get to him—like, clinically.

We’re told by a source inside the Times that the paper is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night cable commercials will tell you add up to depression. Or maybe Low T.

Either way, the investigation was described to us as taking seriously the notion that Obama may be suffering from a depressive episode. Of course, absent a telltale Wellbutrin prescription or testimony from the man himself, it’s really impossible to achieve a reliable diagnosis. And a story like “Obama Appears to Suffer From Depression” can be easily downgraded to “Political Travails Begin to Take Personal Toll on Obama.” So the story in question, if it ever comes out, may not end up supporting the depression thesis. But rest assured: There are people at the Times who, based on the paper’s reporting, believe Obama is depressed—the kind of depression where, if he weren’t the president of the United States, he wouldn’t be getting out of bed in the morning.

Given what Obama and his minions have been doing to the country, if Obama is indeed depressed, this could be considered karmic payback, except that said payback doesn’t help the country at all. (As I’ve pointed out before, we do not want Joe Biden as president either.) It also could be the result of unrealized optimism that Obama, who has never lacked for ego, could indeed transform the country — you know, “care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless,” “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” etc., etc., etc.

George Will once wrote that “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised,” which is why he claimed that pessimists are happier than optimists. I assume, for instance, that despite the continued efforts of Obama and his apparatchiks (see Occupy Wall Street) to ruin our lives and destroy this country, the Republicans will screw up and we’ll be stuck with the audacity of hype for another four years. Obama should remember the words of his favorite failed economist, John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we are all dead.”