Well, a lot of people thought McCain was ballsy to speak his mind in 2004, but he fell back in line as soon as he got serious about politics; right along Bush's footsteps. Still, it doesn't get that much different from Bush than Obama, right? He continues the vast majority of Bush's decisions and programs (both wars, suspection of habius corpus, executive privilege, bailout, etc), but I guess people still find stuff to complain about. I only picked health care because that's among the minor differences to what his predecessor might've done.
Pretty much all of what you see in pop media (that very much includes right wing demogogues who protest to and claim to be anything but) is a rehearsed play with everyone sticking to their roles through force of habit. Remember the incident with ACORN on hidden camera? A great opera of news that plays right to all the cultural stereotypes we expect of America. Well it turns out upon investigation by the California Attorney General, the perpetrator (the "cameraman"/pimp) faked the footage, recombining clips and completely reversing the story of what actually happen, and we know this because he turned over the evidence/original footage for legal immunity (the story of this scumbag actually continues, but that's a story for another day) and are now part of the public record. The real tapes for this all out media coverage story are now available for the world to see, and I guarentee that no news organization will ever will show them, and I can claim with certainty no one here's even heard of these subsequent developments.
You know what's the best part of this story? Some folks wrote to the NY Times, that bastion of "liberal" thought so to speak, to correct or amend its stories which once described in detail how some shady taxpayer funded black community organization is captured on tape either aid prostitutes evade taxes or smuggle sex slaves from mexico, in light of this new evidence. They must be jumping all over this complete reversal, right? Well, I'll let you search for the NY Times story about it. The correspondence those folks had with NYT is published online, and it's rather embarrasing for the "paper of record". Remember, most of the stuff you read in the press (yes that includes the conservative press who complain up and down about being alienated when they publish to millions), you read because someone wanted you to read it, and react as you're conditioned to. Not because they're players in a conspiracy, but because the setup of the news industry compells its employees to play along.
I found it rather amusing a similar topic actually came up in the recent movie Inception. The line is that to convince someone, you need not only plant the idea in their head, but they need to believe they thought of it first. Well, that's exactly how this game works and has for decades. Provide the implicit premise, some basic "facts", and an easy conclusion to jump towards. It's the art of modern PR, invented and perfected right here in America.