The Christianity on display in the race for Republican presidential nominee is, you should forgive the expression, a godsend to nouveau atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and, posthumously, Christopher Hitchens. They're the kind of pious, pompous targets those guys would pray for, if they did.

"The president is wrong." So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.

Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. Sen., and now Obama campaign adviser, Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama's recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: "The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs -- organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It's not just bad policy; it's also dumb strategy." And, he says, it's "dancing with the devil."

Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, "Make me do it." He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph's demand for civil rights for African-Americans.

While President Obama has made concession after concession to both the corporate-funded tea party and his Wall Street donors, now that he is again in campaign mode, his progressive critics are being warned not to attack him, as that might aid and abet the Republican bid for the White House.

The saddest event in politics is the death of the hope that things can basically change. This genre of loss involves a setback not just to an individual but to a population, or a large part of it, which placed its hope in a candidate or party. We last saw it here in the early 1990s, when Jean Chrétien's Liberals forsook the hope and change of their red book, on which they were elected, and chose instead the insipid task of balancing the budget by further shredding social programs. Now it's happening in the United States.

I was sitting on the dock at Thanksgiving with a friend, an investment banker. He was perplexed. "I get creepy e-mails on Obama," he said. "A real barrage. Stressing his middle name. His provenance. Equating him to Hitler. My question is, When did it start? Or were people always this crazy?"

I don't think it was always thus. I think Barack Obama makes people uniquely crazy, on all sides. Take his Nobel Peace Prize.

It drove right-wingers batty, predictably. But leftist Michael Moore, whose new film is an attack on capitalism, wrote snarkily, "Congratulations. ... Now earn it." Then a day later -- and this is what proves that he induces insanity -- Mr. Moore took it back and said he'd been too hard on the President.

President Barack Obama promised "more transparent ... more creative" government. His release of the torture memos, and the Pentagon's expected release of more photos of detainee abuse, is a step in the right direction. Yet he assured the CIA that he will not prosecute those who followed the instructions to torture from the Bush administration. Congress might not agree with this leniency, with prominent senators calling for investigations.

George W. Bush insisted that the U.S. did not use torture. But the four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos released last week by the Obama administration's Justice Department paint a starkly different picture. The declassified memos provided legal authorization for "harsh interrogation techniques" used by the Bush administration in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. They authorized (as listed in the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) "walling ... facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard."

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.

Barack Obama is in the difficult and contradictory position of being a president who wants to do good in a position that requires him ultimately to serve the U.S. economic elite and maintain America's military dominance of the planet. The outcome of the contradiction is unpredictable and depends to a large extent on whether or not those mobilized to get him elected -- especially young people -- can re-mobilize for a protracted and difficult struggle.

This contradiction is revealed when we contrast Obama's Iraq policy, for example, with his efforts to implement a progressive agenda domestically. Ironically, the latter ultimately depends on the former simply because America's wealth and government revenue depend on oil and the U.S.

Stephen Harper, along with the security legions, got a discomfited look on his face when Barack Obama asked if they could step outside to wave to the crowd yesterday after arriving on Parliament Hill. Oh no, he seemed to fret. I don't want it to end this way: taking a bullet for the big-spending liberal. On the other hand, it's his normal expression.

But Barack Obama makes many people edgy, including some on the left, where he's supposed to be. Tom Walkom in the Toronto Star: "He is not God. The best thing ... is that he's not George W. Bush." Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch: "There's always something cloudy about Obama, just when I've almost persuaded myself to like the guy." That includes me.