WE THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt has a theory:

[D.C. voting rights advocates, g]ays, immigrants, union leaders, budget hawks, campaign finance reformers, environmentalists, free-traders, human rights activists and civil libertarians all have had cause to wonder whether they were right to trust Obama. The list is familiar, but the explanation remains disputed.

My theory: The culprit is less ideology than Obama's fidelity to a strategy he can't, for tactical reasons, publicly acknowledge. Given the hand he was dealt, the evidence suggests he resolved that he had to choose only one domestic and one foreign objective for his first two years in office.

As a firm believer in Occam’s razor, I have a simpler [for the progressives, simpler means less nuanced] theory: all the above are wildly unpopular with the majority of the U.S. electorate.