Obama Hope and Change "Dead"- anyone surprised?

This isn’t about having appointed the largest numbers of openly homosexual cabinet members, but specifically Obama’s campaigning of Hope and Change involving generating a respectable political platform.

[quote]by May 2009 that “hope” and “change” were dead in the water.

The reviled Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, which Obama had suspended on his first day in office, was reintroduced, as was indefinite detention without charge or trial as an official policy, even though this was the heart of the Bush administration’s program,

(team Obama) inappropriately invoking sweeping “state secrets” privileges, as, for example, in the case of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture

Moreover, given the deepening of Obama’s paralysis that this signifies, it also makes it seem less, rather than more likely that the President and his party will be able to do anything meaningful to lure back the progressive base that helped secure victory in 2008, in time for the 2012 Presidential election, unless, by some miracle, someone decides to try to rein in the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex as an economic necessity (if for no other reason).

That, however, sounds too much like “hope” and “change,” which, to reiterate, are dead in the water in America today.

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Any chance this opinion of Obama’s “Hope” and “Change” is unfounded?
Is there good reason to still believe some hopium change may still shine in terms of rectifying or even curbing the heinous human rights violations justified by the ongoing yet unofficial war on terror?

Why am I not surprised?