The enthusiasm gap...a euphemism for disillusionment, disappointment, dismay, and disgust.

After being brutalized by the GOP and Bush administration, voters cast their ballots in 2008 for candidates promising change you can believe and were betrayed and ignored by these disguised as Democrats DINOs who acted like Republicans when they got into office, beholden to their financial, corporate, Wall Street controllers, the hell with the common good.

In the midst of a terrible unemployment crisis, there have been no 21st New Deal jobs programs created or on the horizon but the entire GOP and their DINO colleagues are aggressively trying to kill or cripple any remaining New Deal legacies like Social Security.

The following might also help explain yet another reason for the enthusiasm gap.

Robert Scheer at TruthDig writes about Obama hiring another hustler, Tom Donilon, as his national security advisor. 

"As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he [Donilon] was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation.

"Why in the world would President Obama, whose legacy has been sabotaged by a housing crisis that Donilon helped create and conceal, have hired him to run the most sensitive position of public trust in his administration? Because he is one of the most skilled of the Washington players, and, as this president has demonstrated so often with his key appointments, it’s the top hustlers of whom he seems enamored......When Donilon first entered his presidential campaign in 2008, Obama knew he had been working as a legal adviser to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, two firms that had to depend on government bailouts to survive a housing crisis they helped create.

"Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack."

"Why assume that Donilon will now run our foreign policy, wrapped as it is in a secrecy that endangers so many, with any greater sense of moral integrity than he employed when he enriched himself by impoverishing so many ordinary Americans not blessed with his political connections?

"The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption."