this is what concerns me:

I don’t read Jezebel, but I do subscribe to their Joan Didion tag. This is what Sadie Stein had to report back from Didion’s “cold, detached” presence at last week’s New York Review of Books panel.

She started by describing the “unexpressable uneasiness” she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? “We were getting what we wanted,” she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person’s candidate, “a generational thing we couldn’t understand” and the unthinking embrace of “naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism.” Didion bridled at the wanton use of “transformational” and said she couldn’t count the number of times she heard the 60’s evoked “by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s” didn’t involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama’s doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated “welcome healthy realism” and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles “at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers.” She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess “the congratulations of all the nations.” She likened this to the naivete of thinking we’d be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, “in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.”

Sorry, you can go back to worshiping your Hope posters now, kids.