I think Jonathan Bernstein has a tendency to go a bit too easy on the president, but I think this is largely right:
Fascinating press conference today from Barack Obama. His comments at the end about purists were, from my perspective, absolutely correct, substantively.
The truth is that there are a lot of people who just don't accept that the President of the United States can want something, fight for it, fight effectively and correctly, and still not get it. If it doesn't happen, it must have been -- in Obama's words -- a "betrayal." Those people are wrong.
And yet it's awful hard to believe that calling people out on it -- his allies, the activists within the Democratic party -- will do him any good.
As I wrote over at Greg's place, my perception of the president's deal with Republicans on extending the tax cuts for the top 2 percent largely depends on whether the rest of the lame-duck agenda survives as a result. I place more of the blame for the inevitability of this compromise on congressional Democrats who failed to deal with the issue prior to the midterms, but if anything, Obama made this compromise more unpalatable by folding on a key campaign promise and then slamming the left for being angry about it. I think that the Democrats' failure to move on this issue made a deal inevitable, but it does seem like this administration is exceptionally bad at minor elements of base service that might make these kinds of compromises less painful for the people who put him in office.
