Early this year while the health care reform debate was raging, President Barack Obama declared that he'd "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." In the wake of last week's midterm election results and the president’s reaction to them, a third option is now a very real possibility. Will a man who promised to fundamentally transform the country be remembered by history as a mere footnote; a one-term president whose only memorable achievement was being the first African American to hold the office?

Continued...

Even before Election Day, Mr. Obama and his political accomplices were floating all sorts of reasons for the historic defeat his fellow Democrats suffered at the ballot box. A failure to communicate effectively, the "emergencies" that necessitated his unpopular policies, an unreasonably frightened/angry/ignorant electorate; none of these excuses have "stuck" and the honest take-away from the 2010 midterms is that the American people resoundingly rejected President Obama's policies and plans for the future of the county. Hope and change was exposed as hopelessness and the death of the American dream.

While traveling through Asia, Mr. Obama took a moment to try another approach. The headline and sound byte flying around the globe today is that the president will make a "midcourse correction" which many are interpreting as a shift to the center from his unpopular leftist policies. What the headline and sound byte does not include is the context of the "midcourse correction" comment:

During a town hall style meeting in New Delhi, India an Indian college student told Mr. Obama, "It seems that the American people have asked for a change." The president responded by claiming the election results demonstrated voters' frustration about the economy and called that a "healthy thing" but said, even those his party had lost control of the House of Representative and held a smaller majority in the Senate, he would not retreat on spending money for energy and education and offered no specific policy changes. Only after that did he add that the election "requires me to make some midcourse corrections and adjustments. And how those play themselves out over the next several months will be a matter of me being in discussions with the Republican Party." (source)

Not quite the dramatic shift in policy or attitude the headline implied, is it?

Meanwhile, the leaders of the new Republican majority in the House and the larger Republican minority in the Senate are laying out specific plans for the next two years and those plans echo and respect the message voters delivered last week.

Calling the election an "historic rejection of American liberalism and the Obama and Pelosi agenda," Representative Mike Pence (R-Republican) clearly proved the GOP got the message saying on ABC's This Week, "The American people are tired of the borrowing, the spending, the bailouts, the takeovers."

Appearing on CBS's Face The Nation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said the Republicans "owe it to the American people" to try to repeal health care reform and that the results of Election Day meant that "People who supported us - political independents - want it repealed and replaced with something else. (source)

Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), the soon-to-be chairman of the House budget committee, mentioned oversight hearings and cutting finding as ways the Republicans might stop the implementation of Obamacare but admitted, "You can't fully repeal and replace this law until you have a new president and a better Senate. And that's probably in 2013, but that's before the law fully kicks in, in 2014." (source) That's a plan that seems to be in keeping with the voters' wishes as expressed on Tuesday.

It's also in keeping with the very real possibility that President Barack Obama will not be "A really good one-term president" nor a "mediocre two-term president" but a one-term president remembered only for breaking a racial barrier who suffered from an incurable case of tone-deaf arrogance.