Indirectly, to be sure: but nobody sensible to expect plain talking from Barack Obama anyway. At the heart of this stunning revelation is this bit from the Hill:

“Do not buy into this notion somehow that, oh, these problems are too big or Washington is broken,” Obama said. “Washington is not broken. It’s broken right now for a particular reason, but it’s not permanently broken. It can be fixed.”

Now, of course, folks reading that line are immediately flashing back to this:

“Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

Obama delivered those words on Sept. 11, 2008, at a ServiceNation summit. He has said similar things on countless occasions, starting with the 2004 Democratic keynote address in Boston that vaulted the then-state senator to national acclaim.

Soooo, let’s look at this for a second. The premise here is that in 2008 (President R, House D, Senate D) Washington was ‘broken.’ OK. Now it’s 2013 (President D, House R, Senate D), and Washington is only kind of broken. I’m going to out on a limb and assume here that the President doesn’t think that he’s the problem, so presumably Barack Obama thinks that the reason why Washington DC is broken is because the Republicans retook the House in 2010. Which would also indicate that clearly Obama thinks that he fixed the original problem of Washington, DC being broken by getting elected President in 2008 – and thus giving the Democrats all the keys to the government.

I know, I know: people are saying to themselves right now Why is Moe just repeating what Barack Obama said? Because I’m not: I’m merely stating explicitly what Barack Obama kind of skipped over. Because the reason why the GOP took the House back (and decimated the Democratic Senate caucus) in 2010 was because the voting public absolutely blanched at what Barack Obama and his cronies did with the 111th Congress. Because apparently what ‘fixed’ means to a Democrat is: installing onerous new taxes on the middle class; signing off on insanely higher spending; engendering an explosion of the regulatory state; and, of course, harassing wholesale one’s political opponents. Which is fine; but it’s not exactly what the rest of the country considers ‘fixed.’ Which is why the USA seems quite content for the time being to have the President’s will stymied at every turn… even if Obama stamps his foot, and holds his breath until he turns blue.

Because goodness knows that nobody’s really expecting the DCCC themselves to turn anything Blue, any time soon…

Moe Lane (crosspost)