A sticker on a friend’s refrigerator -- “Change Happens 01.20.09” -- reminded me of how hopeful so many of us were when Barack Obama took office. In its own way, though, Obama’s first year was as dismaying as the previous eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Yes, the White House looked more like the Augean Stables by the time Bush got through with it. But Obama won 56 percent of the vote. His party had achieved a filibuster-proof majority. If he needed to divert two rivers to clean up the joint, as Hercules did, it seemed like he had the wherewithal to do it.

Given all that political capital, plus the magnitude of the mess, it also seemed entirely reasonable for the new president to reach across the aisle and get the Republicans to cooperate.

So what’s gone wrong? First, it quickly became clear that the House and the Senate had been wallowing in their own Augean glop for so long that the delivery of a few more barge-loads in Fall 2008 scarcely registered. Not only couldn’t Obama get the Republicans to lift a shovel, he couldn’t even rouse members of his own party to action.

His fault? Hard to say. One of the reasons I favored Obama over Hillary Clinton was that I thought he had a better chance than she did of getting the Republicans to pitch in. But maybe Clinton knew better than to try. Maybe she would have done a better job of scratching Democratic backs and twisting Democratic arms.

To be fair to Obama, though, no one could have known that the Democrats’ supermajority, ineffectual as it was, would last only a year. If any Senate seat seemed a comfy place to park a Democratic rump it was Ted Kennedy’s.

The other exasperating thing about Obama’s first year in office: While he wheeled barrow after barrow of manure out the front door, he did nothing to stop the delivery of fresh piles of stinky stuff at the back door.

A visit to a Web site that sells political bumper stickers tells us everything we need to know about the noxious fumes that have emanated from the opposition in the past year. Here’s a sampling:

• How’s That Hopey-Changey Thing Workin’ Out for Ya?
• Change Is Also What Germany Was Looking for in 1932
• If It Sounds Like Marx and Acts Like Stalin, It Must Be Obama
• Somewhere in Kenya, a Village Is Missing Its Idiot
• Don’t Blame Me – I Voted for the American
• SOS: Stop Obama’s Socialism
• Rejecting Socialism Is Not Racism, It’s Patriotism
• Osama & Obama: Both Have Friends That Bombed the Pentagon
• You Can Put Lipstick on a Muslim – He’s Still a Muslim
• Hoax and Chains
• I’ll Keep My Guns, Freedom and Money. You Keep the Change.
• Drop the Teleprompter and Step Away from the White House
• Nobama
• Obamacare is Making Me Sick
• Obama Lies, Granny Dies
• I Miss W.
• Global Warming Is a Hoax

And of course:

• Impeach Obama

Are we all riled up now? So what’s to be done? Do we crash the mad tea party and try to explain that in a capitalist society government needs to serve as a counterweight to corporate power? Offer a tutorial that shows all the ways in which the U.S. government, like governments in Europe and elsewhere, was “socialist” long before Obama took office?

Do we review the evidence for global warming? Explain that our current energy consumption pattern is unsustainable, keeps us dependent on foreign oil and fouls the atmosphere? That gaps in our knowledge and a few instances of shoddy scientific practice do not undermine the case for global warming – or evolution?

Do we trot out, yet again, evidence of Obama’s Hawaiian birth and Christian upbringing?

Do we remind people that Bush started running up the deficit before the economy crashed and burned, and that his administration was the one who bailed out Wall Street? Remind them that before the Republicans began insisting that Americans do not want health care reform, both the House and the Senate passed health care reform bills?

Clearly, evidence and facts carry little weight with the Obama haters. But what’s the alternative? Clucking our tongues while Sarah Palin gets elected in 2012?

Since Inauguration Day (sounds like there ought to be an etymological connection between Augean and inaugural, but there isn’t), it seems as if the attitude of many of us has been, OK, we’ve got the right guy in charge, we can go back to tending our own garden. Now it may be that Obama wasn’t the right guy after all. But it also may be that being the right guy isn’t enough. He needs us, the people who voted for him, not just to support him, but to remind him that we’re still waiting for him to do the things we expected him to do.

What’s needed, I decided a few weeks ago, was some vigorous know-somethingism to counteract know-nothingism, or maybe a Coffee Party alternative to the Tea Party. Lo and behold, the Coffee Party is up and running. “Wake up and stand up” is the motto.

I’ve never been much for mass demonstrations, but wouldn’t it be great to see a few hundred thousand people marching on Washington to remind the president and the Congress who and what we voted for in 2008? Let’s pick a date, grab some coffee and go.

Don’t forget your waders.