&gt;  A big part of Obama&#x27;s original appeal was his entirely unrealised promise to try and reform Washington. Unfortunately he lost interest in that once elected.<p>Perhaps more relevantly, it was always he lost the narrow (and unreliable, thanks to a handful of often hostile Democratics) Congressional majority at the first midterm, and it was replaced with an unusually obstructionist opposite-party majority which meant that any Obama policy initiative was dead on arrival.<p>&gt; Not that he could really have fixed anything anyway: the mismatch between emphasis on the US President and how much power they actually have is kind of ridiculous.<p>Candidates often have been very eager to point this out and trying to reflect some of the attention to their Presidential campaign to other avenues (including down-ballot campaigns and maintaining an active grassroot network for their priorities.) But this tends to be ineffectual; people still act like electing a President is all you need to be concerned about, and act surprised when they don&#x27;t get what they want from doing that alone.