Comment 14 by Northampton :

Stop voting for the same two parties if they keep letting you down. Seems ridiculous to complain the government is doing x & y, and then vote them in again.

I don't think it is that simple. The usual option to the two party candidates is an extremest or more likely a one trick idiot appealing to some sub group of idiots. When there are reasonable candidates I have voted for them. They don't win.

Even if they did, the thing that seems ridiculous to me that I can't complain about something so complicated as a human being running something so complicated as a country. I did not vote for someone because I agreed with every little thing they said or stood for. I voted for them because I agreed with more of what they said than the others. I don't see how this precludes my protest or complaint when the candidate I voted for does something I disagree with.

Exactly. Politics is all about compromise. You don't lose the right to criticize someone just because you voted for them. One of my favorite stories about US politics is when a coalition of labor interests took a new idea to FDR he told them "great idea now you need to make me do it" I.e., he needed them to put pressure on the Congress and even on FDR himself to generate the support to pass the appropriate legislation.

BTW, speaking to specifics I think its a myth that Obama had this great opportunity that he fumbled when he was first elected. His so called "super majority" contained many blue dog democrats whose politics were really no different from the GOP. That and the actual GOP opposition were one of the most obstructionist in history. They took the fillibuster, something that was only used on very rare occasions in the past and made it a common practice for just about any bill they wanted to block -- which was almost all of them.