Karl Rove writes a smart piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about Obama’s difficulties maintaining the image of a hope-mongering change-agent. Karl argues that Obama’s campaign was not concerned about the actual challenges of governing, which is why he is now struggling to maintain consistent positions:

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

As I’ve written in the past, it was a constant challenge to make sense of Obama’s policy positions while watching him on the campaign trail last year. He would consistently announce bold new goals – like pulling all combat troops out of Iraq, extending health care to all Americans, and closing Guantanamo Bay – without offering a concrete path for how he would achieve them. Nevertheless, those bold promises helped him forge his current image – something that will be hard to sustain as his lofty campaign rhetoric runs into the hard facts of governing.