Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? was a perfect summation of the desperation of the Bush era Democratic Party. In the early 2000s, the bulldozing alliance between the neoconservatives and religious right paved over all who opposed them in middle America. The neoconservative program, particularly the Iraq Invasion was garnering an unpopularity that would come to disgrace it, but the hot-button issues of the religious right, particularly their opposition abortion and gay marriage would keep the popular rabble in line.
Frank lamented that the Midwest and Great Plains states, once the home of an unquenchable (and although he doesn't mention it, mindless) economic populism had fallen under the sway of the Right, which had deceived this native populism with promises of empty social politics. Thus although assumedly Kansans wanted to bust the banks and inflate the currency and expand entitlement programs, their religiosity had deceived them, naïvely casting their votes for a party that promised them superficialities in exchange for what they "truly" should want.
Frank's tome is too much couched in the idea typical among Democrats that their party is that of the oppressed working man, but this aspect is not important. There's no debate that superficial issues like abortion and gay marriage played a decisive role during the now universally maligned Bush era, the latter likely being the cause of John Kerry's close defeat.
The irony now, only a decade later, is that the tables have precisely turned. The nobody senator to speak at Kerry's nomination is now president and it's hard to think of anything error of the Bush administration which has not been earnestly repeated by the new administration. Gentile Bush, meek and mild, was only reported to have wiretapped the phones of suspected criminals, while Mr. Obama blankets all electronic communications with his ever-present ear. Luckily all-out invasions have been out of the purview of the new administration, which has limited itself to blatant arming of "freedom fighters" (among them al-Qaeda) in Syria and has helped perform the final coup de grâce on Arabic nationalism, bringing Islamist and Salafist regimes to power in Egypt, Yemen and Libya. Iraq might ironically be the safest place to be a woman or religious minority in the Arab World, had the US-funded rebels in Syria not begun annexing the country as well.
The Obama administration's continuation of the economic stimulus and TARP are of course nearly required of any politician of an illiberal mindset, and of course there is the Affordable Care Act whose unpopularity has not quite waned as some had expected it. Thus a quick conference with polling data on effectively any specific issue of the past six years might make one think that the current administration was desperately unpopular, but that's simply not the case; president Obama still boasts an approval rating hovering in the low forties depending on the source, a quite good showing for a president outside of election season.
To understand why the president has retained the rank and file, one need only trace the public opinion on the issues of the day. The majority of Americans might disagree with the aforementioned "achievements" of the administration, but apart from them lie those same social policies that kept Republicans alive during the early 2000s: particularly gay marriage. Gay marriage has come to garner more and more of the public attention, now having been cleverly rebranded "marriage equality" by the media; accordingly the past view years have seen an absolute inversion in public opinion on gay marriage, become a boon for the Democratic Party. The president should be quite happy that his position on gay marriage "evolved" into the right one at such a convenient time.
It's important to add that Frank's assessment that voters tend to privilege social policies is more on target than opinion polls might indicate, especially for enforcing consent. This might be paradoxical considering that effectively all opinion polls, including 2004 and now, show a strong preference for economic issues at any given time. This is deceptive because "the economy" is not a discrete policy that is openly available to analysis; it seems reasonable to note that a person's view on "the economy", outside of their realm of personal experience, is mostly a function of their political beliefs aside from reality. Long-term Democrats will report better economic performance under Democratic rulership and Republicans will do the converse.
Gay marriage and other social and civil policies are arguable more electorally important, not only because they form the important moral backdrop of the electoral environment, but also because the popular narrative of political development is couched in social policy. Denizens of democracy know they can't expect that the foreign policies or economic engineering of their nations will ever improve in quality, and public understanding of history reflects this: Americans don't know much about the radical effect of the Radical Republicans on the American state, and even events such as American imperialism are forgettable footnotes. Instead the "important" issues of American history are exclusively civil rights issues: suffrage, abolition, the Civil Rights Act and movement and the like, if economic events are understood as all, they are translated into social jargon.
The end result is that social policy, the opiate of the masses, is the only thing the public feels they can exert some kind of historical control on. Of course to be clear, the extent to which the public impinges on social policy is precisely the same as their effect on economic policy, but economic desires are notoriously less aggregatable in general, and the complex web of regulations and privileges in economic policy as a whole only reflects the incoherent desires of the public as a confused whole. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is a simply yes/no policy (although until 2012, Democrats tried to say both yes and no simultaneously) as are most other issues clearly in the social realm.
At an objective level, the Obama administration has perfectly recapitulated the archetypes of the Bush years, even exceeding it in some respects, but in those areas of economic and foreign policy, fundamentally nuanced, one can throw enough dirt and general obfuscation on the issues to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Gay marriage and the like on the other hand, is reinforcing issue that is clear and discrete, and remains a stable rallying call for the true believers (whose dispositions still aren't impressed the the capitulation of lead Republicans on the issue). Either way, it seems that in the face of the failure of another administration, their sycophant clinging to their "guns and religion" so to speak.