Sometimes I wonder whether the Obama administration’s absolute and total contempt for its most rabid supporters is based on the same thing as my absolute and total contempt for its most rabid supporters. Because let’s face it: if you spent eight years screaming about Imperial Presidencies and Unitary Executives and how George Bush was a unilateralist cowboy and similar agitprop, this passage should be the equivalent of a poisoned-tipped dagger in the kidney.

Senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer outlined the lessons learned in a three-page memo that Obama discussed with his Cabinet in recent weeks, according to several administration officials who have read the document.

Among its conclusions is that Obama, a former state legislator and U.S. senator, too often governed more like a prime minister than a president. In a parliamentary system, a prime minister is elected by lawmakers and thus beholden to them in ways a president is not.

As a result, Washington veterans have been brought into the West Wing to emphasize an executive style of governing that aims to sidestep Congress more often.

…Should be, of course, but will not be, also of course. This feckless willingness to suborn one’s supposed principles in order to achieve a purely tribal partisan win would be the behavior pattern that triggered my aforementioned absolute and total contempt. And possibly Barack Obama’s as well. I’d ask him, but we’re hardly on each other’s Christmas card lists.

Via:

Obama’s “What Went Wrong in 2013” memo says he shld engage with Congress *less*. Is that even possible? http://t.co/F2kbRZmBPT

— Andy Kroll (@AndrewKroll) January 26, 2014

Moe Lane (crosspost)