Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from the comparison. Confronted with a muscular Republican majority in the House in 1994, Mr. Clinton mastered triangulation, which is to say he sailed into a sea neither Republican nor Democratic. It was a strategic masterstroke, but he threw overboard some liberal founding stones.

It's hard to know what is meant by a term like "strategic masterstroke." Obviously Bill Clinton was re-elected; whether voters were responding to Clinton's supposed drift to the right is much more debatable. (The economy improved from 1994 to 1996, which is likely to have been more important.) In any event, Clinton-style centrism did the Democratic Party no favors. As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen wrote (L.A. Times, 4/9/00):

While Clintonism may be good for Bill and Hillary and Al--all of whom seem willing to say or do anything to win the next election--it's worth asking whether Clintonism is good for the Democratic Party.

Let's do the numbers. When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures.

The Democrats under Clintonism resemble a house of cards, with the Clintons and Gore inhabiting the White House atop a party structure crumbling because of an ever-shifting foundation.

It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr. Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favors. If, instead of handing over healthcare to his party's left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got healthcare through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill.

Yglesias points out that Obama did, in fact, offer tort reform to conservatives, quoting Time's Karen Tumulty (5/5/09) on a meeting between Obama and congressional Republicans:

Obama said he was willing to curb malpractice awards, a move long sought by Republicans that is certain to bring strong opposition from the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party.

What, he wanted to know, did the Republicans have to offer in return?

Nothing, it turned out. Republicans were unprepared to make any concessions, if they had any to make.

More broadly, of course, Obama turned healthcare over not to his party's left wing but to his party's right wing, in the person of Max Baucus (the 10th most conservative Democratic senator, according to VoteView), who famously spent months unsuccessfully trying to craft a bipartisan compromise with Republican colleagues.  Can you really follow U.S. politics at all and not be aware of this?

As for nuclear power,  Obama made his call for a "new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" in his January 27 State of the Union speech, and in the month that's followed it has produced no Republican support for climate legislation--predictably enough.

How can people who get paid to pay attention to the Washington political scene get it so wrong? There is a bias built into the D.C. press corps that Democrats' problems are on the left and their solutions are to the right. As Extra! wrote back in 1992, looking back at the elections of '84 and '88: "When the 'pragmatists' lose badly with their centrist approach, they are repainted after the fact as radicals, so the strategy of tilting to the right can be tried again and again." That's what's was done with Bill Clinton after he ran into political trouble.  And now it's happening to Obama.

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.

Then he describes the better way:

Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse--a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center--who enlisted immediately after the attacks ... and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation.

It's hard to know what's creepier: suggesting that a president should lie to drum up support for a war, or suggesting he should do so to fight a war you're not so sure about in the first place.