Part Jack, Part Ghandi, Part Jesus.

Life is getting harder for those who fantasize that Barack represents the second coming. But they're out there.

John Kass at the Chicago Tribune does a nice job of describing the hell of being one of the Devout.

Greedily, they drained the kegs once full of sweet Obama Kool-Aid, drained them to the dregs and mopped up the remains with stale crusts. The inevitable happened—the pain that comes as everything finally becomes clear, in the rosy-fingered light of a terrible dawn.

The stakes are higher for Barack than for regular politicians as he rushes to the center, because he's attacking the fundamental principles of his candidacy.

Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it's been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

If he wants to alter his stance on what day the trash gets picked up, folks could live with that. Obama, though, is where he is because he promised something more.

They're at the dance now and he's the one with the keys and he's the only ride they've got. And they don't like it.

When Obama started to rearrange the words and the meaning of his absolute, unequivocal commitment to withdraw our troops, on a schedule, without concern over the fate of Iraq or Iraqis, that was shocking to us normal folks. But to the anti-war left, that was fresh, cool water in the middle of their long desert march to the promised land.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he'll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn't say he'd listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

They abandoned their chosen one for the inexperienced and unvetted one, assigning to him, in a Freudian trick, all the positive attributes they wanted to see in Hillary but couldn't. In the fresh canvas of Barack, they could project their idealized vision of what a presidential candidate should be. Part Jack, Part Ghandi, Part Jesus.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

A Chicago politician. Soon, that will be all that's left for the left, because that's all there ever was.

The story about the mural, taking up a block in Boston, is here.