President Obama was elected on an inspiring message of hope and change. The content of these wonderful things was left to the eye of the beholder. That’s how it’s done, and Obama did it very well. In his first year in office he has indeed changed things. He has steered a very moderate policy course and tried very hard to exemplify what he calls “post partisanship.” He has tried to live up to a rhetorical claim that everyone makes but no one seriously tries to fulfill, namely putting partisanship aside and trying to solve big problems by consensus. This was both a political and a policy mistake! He thought that the American people really did want bipartisan cooperation and compromised policy responses to serious problems, something Americans only claim when confronted with the false choice of gridlock or unprincipled compromise.Click HERE for the rest of the story.