via me at flickr.com

It’s been nearly a month since we heard from David Broder, a blessed 28 Days — uh oh.

But at that time, he’d let Barack Obama know that he had won him over:

Obama used his news conference Tuesday [December 7th, a day which will live in Brodery"] to define himself, more clearly than ever before, as a raging moderate – a man who recognizes that compromise is the key to serving a broad and diverse set of constituencies, rather than fit some ideological standard of intellectual purity.

Meanwhile, in the world of the Republican Party:

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off [legislation advanced by Democrats],” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

So even good and popular legislation can be made to seem “extreme” and dangerous by not being bipartisan.

And it’s not like Obama didn’t offer compromises anyway, thinking he looked like the “bipartisan” guy Broder loves, while undermining both the effectiveness of legislation and playing into this false, but real, perception.

He may be playing 11-dimensional chess, but he has often kind of sucked at it.