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I sure hope you are representative of Obama's younger support base, who are getting disillusioned and heading further left. It would be a nice thing to hear.
Below is a story about how I started off liberal and then turned left in the bad old days. It is basically a story of bait and switch Democrats.
This was what happened to me with Kennedy and Johnson. Johnson's 1964 election was my first.
I had been arguing with some radical friends over Kennedy and whether he was really a liberal or not, from back in the Nixon Kennedy debates. My radical friends were trying to convince me Kennedy was as big a war hawk and reactionary as Nixon. I had a hard time being convinced of this because of Kennedy's debate performance over another controversy nobody remembers now, i.e the Quemoy and Matsu `crisis'.
[These are tiny islands in the Taiwan Strait. Some are held under PRC and others are claimed by Taiwan (then called Formosa). The short story was that Kennedy had made a speech between the presidential debates and called Nixon trigger happy over Quemoy and Matsu.]
Anyway Q & M were code for the willingness to start a nuclear war. Better Dead than Red. We used to argue this stuff in high school. The high school was essentially a rightwing reactionary fortress. My US Government and History teacher wore a Nixon button that fall during those debates. We had to salute the flag every morning when classes began. You could actually be sent to detention for not stopping, putting your hand on your heart and standing at attention.
There was great motivation for following all this foreign policy nonsense because back then all twelfth grade boys in high school had to attend a mandatory several hour long assembly. The assembly was run by the US military services and the topic was Your Obligation to Serve the United States of America. There was a large panel of about seven or eight dress uniformed speakers who represented the armed services and national guard. Each one made a patriotic speech and then explained what their service branch could do for us. For those of us with good grades (not me), we were urged to apply to the military academies for college.
I came out of that assembly with my head spinning. All I could think of was how can I get out this shit, i.e. the draft? Nuclear war, combat against people I never heard of, in places I couldn't find on the map. It was that or go to prison.
Reserve Officers Training Corps, ROTC was mandatory in the university system in California. Your course reg packet would not be approved without ROTC class for the first two years. If you had gone to ROTC and then got drafted instead of signing up, you lost your ROTC credit and started service as a private. Nice huh? ROTC was optional in the state and community college systems.
Well the point was all this (plus my father worked in LA newspapers) that got me interested and kept me interested in the world and politics.
Side note. My problems with my radical red friends was they kept talking about things that sounded like conspiracy theory stuff to me. I really didn't understand economics and had no idea what imperialism meant. Although it kind of rang a bell somewhere, since there was the Sugar Lobby and Cuba. Problem was there was no US economic interest in Vietnam. We got our rubber and minerals from Latin America and or Africa.
For the commies, there was always some hidden reason, not reported in the news, for why the US establishment was doing this or that. I really could not get it through my head that Corporate America was so insanely evil as they claimed. It really took reading Domkoff's book, ``Who Rules America'' to convince me. An older commie student friend gave me the book for Christmas 1968.
CG
PS. Even with all that, I still fall for the bait on hope for change, every time. From Carter to Clinton, on to Gore and now Obama.