Perhaps this will be a learning experience?
One last nugget from Richard Wolffe's new book on the Obama White House. In an interview with Wolffe, the President seemed to acknowledge that in pursuing bipartisan support for health reform, he and Democrats got snookered by a previously-thought-out GOP strategy to delay the process for as long as possible in order to politically damage him and the Democratic Party.
Here's the President on page 75:
"You have to give the Republicans credit, just from a pure political perspective, that they used every instrument available to them in the Senate to prolong the process in such a way that helped drive down support nationally, that gave everybody a sense that somehow Washington was broken," he told me. "At a time when everybody was worrying about jobs, for us to have to spend six to nine months on this piece of legislation obviously was not helpful."
In other words, Obama is saying, Republicans were only gaming the process all along.
It's really hard to know how to react to that other than to say, "well, duh," or maybe "we told you so, over and over and over, while it was happening." Anybody outside of The Village who watched the process of Max Baucus chasing after Enzi and Grassley and President Snowe's weekly meetings in the White House saw precisely what the GOP was doing.
So the question now is whether this experience will be instructive for Obama, whether he can get past, as Sargent says, "heaping blame on himself for failing to change the tone in Washington." You go to policy wars with the GOP you have, not the GOP you wish you had. That's kind of important to keep in mind going forward on things like, you know, tax cuts for the rich.