"Obama is a Man of the Left. That's Who He Is. " Charles Krauthammer

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.