I really had my doubts throughout his first term, but I wrote them off a lot of the time. He clearly wanted to implement far-left ideas for us, but it would take longer than four years, and needed to play nice to get the second term. He fought like hell at first for Obamacare... and then seemed to stop. The drone program was absolutely vile and I had no way to defend him, but I still hoped for the second term redemption, that he'd pull out all the stops. Of course, I'm no longer hopeful either.
Sadly that qualifies as "far-left" in America policy-makers. Few times have there been truly liberal policies proposed in the last 15 years. As for the rest, it was mostly the promises he made before his term, limiting corporations and whatnot. Of course it was unfounded and never was even remotely addressed once he took over, but I still held out hope longer than I should have.
If you actually look at the concrete positions he laid out in his 2008 bid for president instead of focusing on the empty rhetoric like "hope" and "change" it was fairly easy to predict what he would do as president. He was actually pretty straight forward.