It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period

In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.

Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.

It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.

Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:

1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse

There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.

Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.

What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.

If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.