Obama is "not who moderates thought he was"

It's a fact that study after study in nations all over the world have established beyond real dispute, though the media doesn't discuss it, and people either don't realize it, or ignore the knowledge: couples who live together before marriage have a divorce rate about twice that of couples who don't.

The reasons are likely complicated, but at least one is that the very advantage of "shacking up-" that you can simply dump your partner and move on at any moment, without entanglements- artificially extends the courtship stage of the relationship well into cohabitation. When actual- rather than rhetorical- commitment takes place, and the legal bond is established, both parties for the first time discover who their new spouse really is, and has been all along. Courtship serves the function of finding that out before things get complicated legally and relationally, and too complicated even emotionally; moving in together short-circuits that process, and
more often than not sets the couple up for a nasty surprise once their guard goes down and they actually let their partner know just what they've signed on for- and with whom.

Here is, on the whole, a very insightful analysis of why the Obama honeymoon with the American people may be heading for divorce court. He's not the suitor the country bought.

Don't say some of us didn't try to warn you.

It does have one flaw, though. Its author- a self-proclaimed "moderate-" still buys the Obama line that the alternative to Obama-style European socialism is "the Limbaugh brigades." That's nonsense, of course- and David Brooks ought to know it, even if he does write for the Democratic Campaign Pamphlet of Record, the New York Times.

HT: Real Clear Politics