[I]t remains to be seen if Obama has the will to blast past these barriers and take the win with an extremely hostile opposition getting ever more radical in deeply stressful times. We just don't know yet. [. . .]

But that doesn't mean he doesn't also see the value of placing his political adversaries in the role of unreasonable extremists. His administration has done that with some success, I would say (and a lot of help from the crazies) but they haven't yet explicitly positioned their policy positions as the reasonable, mainstream alternative and I think it's because they are flummoxed without any bipartisan support. The political establishment can't see anything being "reasonable" if the Republicans are rejecting it.

He needs to say it anyway, as Perlstein prescribes. I would predict that citizens in the middle are well prepared to see total obstructionism as an unreasonable position, even if the Villagers see it as a sign of liberal extremism. After all, to them all partisanship is a sign of liberal extremism.

(Emphasis supplied.) The center of the debate about Mark Schmitt's Theory of Change was precisely that Obama never defined change in policy terms. It was very much "Obama= Change" disconnected from any actual policy change. Of course in the general election, Obama defined change negatively - to wit, he defined McCain as Bush and himself as Not Bush. This was effective politically and given the magnitude of the financial crisis and his electoral win, it was enough to create a mandate for policy change.

The problem is Obama has squandered that mandate for transformational change. His change agenda was simply too timid for the problems and for the political and policy opportunity. And he could well sink his Presidency because of his timidity on the economic situation. But he can still define change in terms of policy and by defining his policy opponents as extreme -- the way Lincoln did in 1860.

Speaking for me only