Obama's learning curve.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Barack Obama - Editorial

Barack Obama came to to Washington intent on building bipartisanship. He supped at George Will's house with Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer and other conservative pundits (I hope Obama brought a taster). He went to Capitol Hill and schmoozed Republicans. He brought some of them to the White House to watch the Super Bowl. He seemed to think by his charm alone he could make them abandon their hidebound ideology and see the light.

No such luck.

The Republicans, unanimously in the House and nearly so in the Senate, voted against his stimulus package.

Tardily, he learned that ideology and power are more important to them than an extended hand.

Tardily, he went on the offensive. The American people, he said, "did not vote for the false theories of the past, and they didn't vote for phony arguments and petty politics, and they did not vote for the status quo." They voted for change, he added, "and that's what we're going to deliver."

In a similar pattern, Obama came late to the realization that the American people have no tolerance for the bankers who destroyed our economy. In his Inaugural Address, he obliquely faulted the "greed and irresponsibility of some," but in the same sentence, he quickly deflected any Wall Street blame by citing "our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."

Contrast that with what FDR said, in his first Inaugural, when Wall Street had also messed everything up. "The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous moneychangers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Now that's laying it all out there.

And while Obama did...