Yes, I think Liberals are goofy about Mr. Obama.

Eighteen months ago, the United States elected its first African American president, Barack Obama, who came to power at a time of extraordinary challenge:

His administration faced two faltering wars, a crippled economy, and a toxic political climate in Washington DC and around the country.

Conservatives quickly, and very reasonably, formed ranks against his policies and ideas.

Mr. Obama certainly isn’t a socialist — that’s nonsense — but he wanted to do things that the vast majority of Republicans don’t like.

The health care reform act, financial reform, the jobs stimulus bill, the jobs-saving bailout of GM, those are just a few of the substantial realignments of America’s society and economy that right-leaning voters oppose.

In the next few weeks, Mr. Obama is also likely to lead the effort to defeat the Bush-era tax cuts, which largely favored the wealthiest people in our country.

If he succeeds, he’ll likely do so with only one or two Republican votes.

The weird part of this drama isn’t that conservatives have fought the President’s agenda hammer and tong.

On the contrary, it’s a healthy part of our democracy that they are providing a completely different vision, giving us all a clear choice.  (I’ll blog more about what those choices look like in the days ahead.)

No, the Twilight Zone part of this story is the growing number of liberals who already — eighteen months after the start of Mr. Obama’s first term — want to throw him under the bus.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Frank Rich has a lengthy essay called “Why Has He Fallen Short?”

With no hint of humor, Rich uses terms like “nadir” and “doomed” to describe the state of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The popular liberal blog Crooks and Liars has been offering a similar essay, penned after the recent “Netroots” convention in Las Vegas.

According to the writer, lefties gathered to lament the fact that Obama is “not a heck of a lot better than George Bush…”

This includes a lot of feminists (angry at what they see as betrayals on abortion), many Hispanics angry at the continued harsh enforcement of immigration laws, gays who feel Obama has betrayed clear promises on gay rights, anti-war activists saddened by escalation in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and a mishmash of folks who think health care reform was a dog’s breakfast and that the general way the economy and financial reform has been handled is a disgrace.

I’m not cherry-picking here.  Surf the liberal media — from MSNBC to The Nation — and you’ll find card-carrying liberals who are more or less ready to pack it in.

Likewise, a growing number of polls show that the greatest drop-off in support for Mr. Obama and his party is occurring in liberal bastions like Vermont and Massachusetts.

Before I wrestle with the whys of this disenchantment, a reality check.  I’ve opined here before that Mr. Obama’s legislative record is nothing short of astonishing.

(Again, if you’re conservative, it’s reasonable to view that record as astonishingly bad…)

Any other president would have been tickled to get through his first two years with one trophy the size of health care reform.

This White House has crossed the finish line a half dozen times on major policies and legislation, while also locking in the confirmations of two center-left Supreme Court justices.

What’s more, the President’s economic policies have drawn accolades from nonpartisan analysts.  Here’s a report on new study of the stimulus package released last week.

The Great Recession wasn’t a depression, thanks to federal stimulus efforts.

That conclusion flows from the first major, independent analysis of recent fiscal and monetary policies — such as the bank bailouts, the home-buyers tax credit and Cash for Clunkers stimulus program.

“The stimulus has done what it was supposed to do: end the Great Recession and spur recovery,” wrote Alan Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton University, and Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics.

Meanwhile, here’s Jonathan Alter in his book The Promise, describing Obama’s first year in office.

PolitiFact.com, a database of the St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for its fact-checking of the 2008 campaign, had catalogued 502 promises that Obama made during the campaign.

At the one-year mark the totals showed that he had already kept 91 of them and made progress on another 285.

The database’s “Obameter” rated 14 promises as “broken” and 87 as “stalled.”

With promises ranging from “Remove more brush and vegetation that fuel wildfires” to “Establish a playoff system for college football,” PolitiFact selected 25 as Obama’s most significant.

Of those, an impressive 20 were “kept” or “in the works.”

Despite that track record, liberals are so sour on Mr. Obama that many of them are likely to stay home in large numbers this November, likely tipping key House and Senate races to the GOP.

So what’s behind all the ire?

The biggest miscalculation made by liberals was that they viewed the President’s campaign centrism — his clear support for the Afghanistan war, for example — as a ruse.

But the fact is that Mr. Obama has stuck religiously to the agenda he laid out during the campaign, including those promises that run contrary to the liberal agenda.

In the end, liberals and conservatives will both have a choice come November.

For conservatives, that choice is fairly easy.  They see Mr. Obama’s policies as so dangerously liberal that even a muddled, disorganized Republican agenda is preferable.

They’re working hard to elect what would certainly be one of the most right-of-center Congresses in American history.

Liberals, on the other hand, will have to decide whether the Democratic majority they created in Congress is hopelessly flawed or worth saving.