I'd never volunteered for any politician or any political campaign before in my life. And yet at 37 years old, on the night Obama was elected, I stood in a room full of hundreds of my fellow campaign volunteers, and I wept. Words can't do justice to the hope and joy I felt that night, or the next day, for the next few months. Obama turned out to be a pragmatist rather than the transformational leader he sold himself as, but I was stoic about it. “Pragmatism will accomplish more in the end” I thought. Then when he championed health *insurance* reform that contained a few truly significant accomplishments, but that let pharmaceutical companies and health care providers get away with little in the way of substantive reform, I was disappointed. When I wondered why he didn't use his communication skills and his mandate for change to make a clear case to his supporters that a Democratic Congress should be able to deliver MUCH better results than the weak and timid final bill, I felt even more disappointed. It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, gone to waste. When he chose to continue (and in some cases, augment) most of the Dubya-era “War on Terror” policies, and when the financial reform turned out to be the *opposite* of transformational, I was very annoyed. When Obama asserted his right as President to order the assassination of an American citizen—with effectively no oversight or review capabilities granted to any person or entity, and with no requirement to even acknowledge that he'd done so—I was worried and angered, and felt betrayed. I wondered where *my* country had disappeared to. It was a familiar feeling; I'd felt that way all through the Bush presidency. I started paying even closer attention, and soon I felt sorry that I'd even bothered to cast a vote. Disgusted. Sickened. And fairly hopeless. Obama's presidency has taught me an excellent lesson: Our political system is broken and corrupt almost beyond repair, and anyone who stands a real chance of gaining office in this system is almost by definition too corrupt, too conservative, too connected, and has too much interest in maintaining the status quo, to be trusted. For me, continuing to remain involved through endless strings of excuses, empty promises, and abject failures spun as towering triumphs is simply too draining and too painful. In the very unlikely event that Americans wake up and force an end to the corruption by demanding that the two major parties relinquish the advantages they've given themselves, and by forcing the enactment of very strict, airtight laws stripping all corrupting influences from the political system, I might jump back in and give a damn again. Of course, THEN everyone will have to vote for sane and honest and intelligent leaders to insure that the overhaul sticks. I'm sure as hell not holding my breath.