WASHINGTON — Election results in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City last week threaten to turn what Barack Obama hoped would be a new era at the White House into a quirky one-term interlude, like Jimmy Carter’s.

Of the three elements that keyed Obama’s historic 2008 primary and general election victories, only one, the black vote, was visible in the victories of two Republican candidates for governor and the reelection of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Independent. Obama’s youth vote and its cousin, the independent, fled the Democrats or stayed home. Disillusioned independents voted overwhelmingly for Republicans Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey, and nudged Bloomberg across the line for the third and last time. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Calif., read the voodoo rabbits’ bones and quickly ordered her nervous Democratic majority kept in this bubble and away from constituents for the weekend to vote for a health insurance bill before it could be analyzed.

Jay Leno on Thursday summarized the turn-off of independent voters when he cracked: “A lot of people are saying these Republican victories are a backlash against Obama’s policies. What policies?” Actually, there were policies — promises as understood by young people and independents— lofted by Obama in his primary and general election campaigns. Obama was going to end, people heard him say, America’s involvement in Iraq by the middle of 2009, and implicitly limit troop commitments to Afghanistan. They heard him say he would ban lobbyists and crooks from his administration.

Obama ran against Bill and Hillary Clinton (as well as George W. Bush) auguring the end of Clinton secrecy, double-speak and the Clintons’ shady pals.

Things were going to change. “I’ve learned I have the strength to change,” Godfather Michael Corleone assured his wife Kay just before he socked her across their Washington hotel room. Likewise, Obama, as soon as he lifted his hand from Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, began filling his administration with Clintonites, giving them three of the four top cabinet posts, State, Treasury and Justice. Defense went to a Bush holdover. After getting the Democratic Senate to confirm Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Attorney General Eric Holder, ignoring their controversial backgrounds, Obama then began violating his own no-lobbyist rules to populate his government.

Next came his “stimulus” package, which gave construction jobs short shrift, diverting the bulk of the money to his pals in the hospital unions and teachers’ and other public employee unions in a Chicago-style election payoff.

In February, he noiselessly doubled our troop deployments to 68,000 into the Afghan meat grinder. To appease the moneyed militarists in this town’s influence sector, he will send more young Americans. Lately, we learn he mimicked the Clintons’ use of the historic White House as a fund-raising platform and prostituted our foreign service by awarding all major ambassadorships to big campaign donors. Like the Clintons, Obama took talks about health insurance reform behind closed doors and made a notorious deal with the prescription drug lobby not to import drugs from Canada or Europe, or jawbone lower prices for seniors.

Now he is pushing a health insurance bill, drafted with hospital lobbyists, that will push premiums higher, and energy legislation that will tax the poor and the middle class but will do little to reduce pollution. On Friday, unemployment hit 10.2 percent, the clear result of Obama’s diversion of stimulus money away from construction projects and the refusal of his economic advisors, mostly from Wall Street, to confront China on its undervalued currency.

People aren’t dumb. The Gallup polling organization said last week that in some ways Obama’s overall approval rating is the worst it has seen since 1945.