On President Obama’s health-care rhetoric:

I think the president is at sea. He has just had his entire agenda of Year One rejected, and I think he has talked himself into believing that it’s because of process and not substance.
As we heard in that clip, he thinks that on health care it was the way it was presented — all the backroom deals. [They] certainly contributed to people’s unhappiness about it, but it was the substance. The dogs don’t like the dog food. He thinks it’s the bowl or the advertising, or perhaps he didn’t speak slowly enough in dog-ese in explaining it. But it’s the substance — [an idea] which he won’t accept.
So he doubles down on substance. He’s staying with health care. He talked about trying again on cap-and-trade. He is going to have the meeting at the end of the month with Republicans on health care. But he thinks it’s about openness and process, transparency, and bipartisanship, and that’s why he is attempting all of this.
In fact, the way that the White House trumpeted the meeting today is, again, he is showing he reaches across the aisle.
I think he is missing the point. With unemployment at 10 percent and with an agenda — a whole year’s rejected agenda — which Americans in general think was beside the point, Americans aren’t troubled about process here. It’s substance. I think he is — if I can use another analogy — barking up the wrong tree. . . .
I think they really are at sea on this. Obama is not like a Clinton, who could pivot, change his agenda, change the substance, and become a centrist because he always was a centrist originally, even before he reached the presidency. . . .
Obama is a man of the left. That’s who he is. This is an agenda he believes in. I grant him utter sincerity on this. He is not ready to abandon it. He thinks it’s a matter of process, and he thinks he can recover politically if he shows how, in process, he is like the Obama he promised in 2008 and 2007 — open, transcendent, and reaching across to the other side. I think he is wrong, but I think that’s his analysis.

On Obama’s speaking of two tracks with Iran:

And when he spoke about a regime of sanctions, I think it was important. I think what that means is an array of them. I think he understands that out of the Security Council he will get almost nothing because China will water anything down to the point where the sanctions are meaningless.
However, I think strategically you want to get something out of the Security Council, even if it’s weak, as a way to legitimize unilateral sanctions by the Europeans and the Americans, perhaps EU-wide, perhaps only the French, the Germans, the British, and us — which [sanctions] would bite.
Now, the problem with the administration is Obama still speaks of isolating the regime with the sanctions. I mean, that is so absurd. This is a regime — after 30 years [of taking] over an American embassy and kidnapping its personnel — it accepted isolation a long time ago. It’s not an issue, isolation.
The point of sanction is to punish and to squeeze. And it’s not as if the squeezing and punishing will change the policy of this regime. It won’t. What it can do is to increase the crisis in the country in which you have got simmering and really volcanic anger against [the regime].
You want to heighten the contradictions, as Lenin would say, and help along a revolution if possible. That’s the reason you want sanctions, not that it’s going to change the regime’s behavior.