Duh!

President Obama thinks in retrospect that he should have spent more time convincing Americans of the rightness of his policies!

"I think that one of the challenges we had two years ago was we had to move so fast, we were in such emergency mode, that it was very difficult for us to spend a lot of time doing victory laps and advertising exactly what we were doing, because we had to move on to the next thing," Obama said. "And I take some responsibility for that."

How can the man who built such a stunning 2008 campaign admit to such mind-blowing naivete? Governing is not an abstract policy exercise. You have to sell, sell, sell, and when you win, you have to keep selling. You have to constantly show the citizenry the benefits of your policies so that they'll give you a chance to enact more of them.

Obama lays out the puerile contradictions of Republican policy oxymorons in the CNN article, but he lays them out as argument. He needs to learn to go the next step: Assail their good faith directly.

The biggest problem that Republicans pose to the American polity is not their frequent (but not universal) bigotry. It's their dishonesty. You can't get there politely, but a successful future requires that we go there.