Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column for National Review Online examines the decline and fall of “hope and change.”

Obama ran on his iconic status as the would-be first black president. For the most part, he hid his spread-the-wealth agenda. A plumber did better than establishment journalists at prying out a smidgen of Obama’s worldview. The media helped reduce Obama’s Chicago friends such as Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko to complete strangers. To evoke them was tantamount to racism.

The result was a full-fledged liberal presidential agenda of a sort not seen since the New Deal. Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy were more centrists and realists than progressive true believers. In other words, since the 1940s voters have not trusted the left wing of the Democratic party to run the country. And for good reason. Barack Obama’s signature achievements — rammed through a Democratic Congress or enacted by questionable executive orders — now lie in ruins.

A therapeutic foreign policy, adorned by apologies for and contextualization of past American conduct, has turned the Middle East into Somalia and empowered Vladimir Putin, the Chinese apparat, and soon-to-be nuclear Iran. The defense budget will reach record lows, as money still shifts from military deterrence to more social programs and entitlements.

Old allies either are ignored or put under suspicion, while new ones such as Turkey seem to resent the U.S. more deeply the more that they are courted. After Obama, the American idea of a red line, step-over line, or deadline will be comic. The war against terror has been reduced to a war against unnamed individuals who sometimes commit workplace violence or cause manmade disasters. In Obama Farm, waterboarding three confessed terrorists at Guantanamo Bay is a crime against humanity; blowing up 3,000 suspected terrorists and anyone nearby through Predator drone assassinations is the stuff of presidential joking at Washington banquets.

At home, a natural recovery after a deep recession was aborted by massive government borrowing that was wasted on abetting crony capitalists and shoring up collapsing union and pension funds. Before he is through, Obama may well have borrowed more than all previous presidents combined. In the surreal context of the present, slashing defense and raising taxes to reduce trillion-dollar-deficits to half-trillion-dollar deficits — still higher than any other before Obama — are dubbed fiscal progress.