The people who understood the US politics knew that the change would not come the moment President Obama selected his ‘Wall Street government.’ 

The subsequent explanations what had really happened spanned the space between these two extremes:

• Unlike for ex. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was new to Washington; he couldn’t possibly have known that what he undertook to do was impossible.
• Barack Obama was selected and groomed for his role by ‘the 1%’ (people with influence and money); they knew that after George W. the voters would want change; Obama was an opportunity to play the change card without compromising their privileges.

Noam Chomsky gave this explanation: Like every other profession, politics too has its know-how and its rules. To begin with, if you want to be elected, you need money; lots of it (Chomsky points at studies that established a strong correlation between the ranking in elections and the ranking in campaign funds). So the first thing you must do is team up with the people who have money. Next, you hire the best professionals to design and run your campaign. Normally they work for companies like Coca Cola (which means that they know their business; and in particular, that what they sell and what they say do not need to be related). The first thing they’d do is conduct market research. 

And the first thing they’d find out, in 2008, was that the people wanted change. 

❦

In whatever way you may choose to explain what happened, you will probably agree with Arianna Huffington’s remark in World in the Year 2011: “In America, 2008 was all about “hope”: crossing our fingers and electing leaders who we thought would enact the change we desperately needed. Gazing into my crystal ball, I predict 2011 is going to be all about hope 2.0, the realisation that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians operating from within it—and that real change will come only when enough people outside Washington demand it (...).”

REFLECTION: What will it take to 'fix the system'? So many courses of action have been already tried; can you think of a new one, that truly has a chance to work?