Excerpt:
These days, even when President Obama tries to avoid making contentious decisions and instead takes a break to play golf, he gets criticized. It's a far cry from the days of the campaign when he appeared to his supporters to have Superman-like qualities and BP wasn't on people's minds. Those supporters shouldn't mourn, however. That the president appears to be so fallible is good news, even for them.
There is an unfortunate tendency in America to idolize politicians, especially dead ones, almost as demigods. The Founding Fathers often get this treatment, as do subsequent presidents like Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan (depending on your political ideology). I once heard a former Reagan White House employee, who now is a Fox News personality, declare at an event: "I worked for Ronald Reagan, and he never made a single mistake in his life." (The crowd cheered.)
Reagan was a great president, but he certainly wasn't flawless. Even for the right, his decision not to support Britain in the Falklands War, or his laying a wreath at a cemetery that included the graves of Hitler's SS henchmen, weren't his finest hours. Did that mean Reagan wasn't a great president? No. It meant he was human.
The left is of course just as guilty of this type of hero-worship. John F. Kennedy had many qualities, but fidelity to his wife wasn't one of them. Yet that side of his character was actively hidden from the public by his supporters, with a CIA chief even destroying the diary of a mistress, as if revealing his personal failings would somehow make his lofty rhetoric and achievements less inspiring.