Lunchtime Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Dan Pfeiffer on How White House Learned to Be Liberal

…He ran as a figure who could overcome partisan polarization, yet he has instead presided over more of it despite accomplishing the majority of the substantive agenda he promised. Obama and his spokespeople have spent most of their administration quietly at war with the conventional wisdom in Washington over the cause of this failure…. Structural forces… rising polarization… the disintegration of restrictions on campaign finance… the news media… people select only sources that will confirm their preexisting beliefs. All of this combined makes communication with Republicans mostly hopeless…. Demographic change will eventually force Republicans to compete with Democrats for some of the same voters, reopening a national political conversation….

The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans…. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, ‘what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.’ If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011…. Ever since Republicans took control of the House four years ago, [Obama’s] attempts to court Republicans have mostly failed while simultaneously dividing Democratic voters. Obama’s most politically successful maneuvers, by contrast, have all been unilateral and liberal…. ‘There’s never been a time when we’ve taken progressive action and regretted it.’ This was deeply at odds with the lesson Bill Clinton and most of his aides (many of whom staffed Obama’s administration) had taken away from his presidency. But by the beginning of Obama’s second term, at least, the president seemed fully convinced…