David Brooks tells us, once again, that Obama is no ideologue. Apparently, it’s just his cool, thoughtful pragmatism that leads him to agree with Nancy Pelosi on practically every major domestic issue (his “voracious pragmatism”). I don’t doubt that Obama’s strategy meetings are civil, thoughtful, smart, and altogether impressive. The problem appears to be that there isn’t anyone to interrupt during one of the meetings and say, very politely and thoughtfully, “Uh, sir, giving the unions a carveout until 2018 is disgusting. And, um, running a car company is a bad idea. And, er, most of things we’re saying about the health care bill are kinda sorta untrue. If you’d forgive me, I’d just also like to mention that we’ve governed domestically like Pelsoi Democrats for the last year. I know that’s just a bizarre conincidence owing to unusual circimstance beyond the control of our highly rational deliberations, but, you know, I just thought I’d put it out there — in the interests of civil and open dialogue, of course.”

The Journal has a more persuasive take on Obama’s first year:

The real message of Massachusetts is that Democrats have committed the classic political mistake of ideological overreach. Mr. Obama won the White House in part on his personal style and cool confidence amid a recession and an unpopular war. Yet liberals in Congress interpreted their victory as a mandate to repeal more or less the entire post-1980 policy era and to fulfill, at last, their dream of turning the U.S. into a cradle-to-grave entitlement state.
We had been encouraged a year ago by Mr. Obama’s selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because we thought he would have learned from the Clinton failure of 1993-1994 and knew enough to stand up to the Congressional left. How wrong we were. Mr. Emanuel and his boss have instead deferred to Congress’s liberal barons on every major domestic policy.