WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obama’s Dark Night of the Soul. “Life keeps getting worse for President Obama. It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell. It is not just that he lost control of Congress in the midterms. No: the mainstream, liberal press and the American left are deserting him now. . . . We and the President were always likely to come to this point. The adulation lavished on a one-term senator of little life experience was not a good thing for anyone.”