"These dudes are old school communications people. They're playing the game the way they know how because it's been lucrative for them. And they're destroying the whole promise of the Obama Administration in the process."

As 2009 comes to a close, and with it, the first year of the Obama administration, one big question seems to be hanging over the man who said he had "The Audacity to Hope," and promised his supporters "Change We Can Believe In." That question can be summed up with two simple pictures.

How did this...

produce this?

It's not every morning that you run into one of the most powerful men in the country in relatively intimate and unguarded surroundings, so today as I was boarding the shuttle down to DC and saw White House senior advisor David Axelrod seated by a window just behind the first class section, I decided I had to seize the moment. My parents gave me "change the world" disease when I was young, after all, and I probably will never shake it.