Dreams from my Porkulus

We suppose the prospects of getting an electoral drubbing in November leads people to say all sorts of goofy, er, truthful things.

Just last week, the President admitted to the non-existence of shovel-ready jobs. Or was it, perhaps, last year?

Here's NYT columnist David Brooks on PBS' NewsHour with respect to the ultimate folly of Porkulus and when it was this fact dawned upon the President:

DAVID BROOKS, NYT: Yes. Well, I shouldn’t have confessed this. He said this to me off the record about a year ago. But it hasn’t…

JIM LEHRER: Off the record? So, then you can’t talk about it.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, because Peter Baker is a better journalist than I am, because I couldn’t get him to go on the record with that thing.

JIM LEHRER: He said this to you a year ago?

DAVID BROOKS: It was obvious. I mean, you are trying to build a stimulus package. And when they were trying to build it, believe me, they would have loved to have filled it with infrastructure jobs. But the projects just didn’t exist. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t find them.

(italics, ours)

Last week, last year... what's $800 billion amongst friends and uh, voters.

And dig this:

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington.

So, does this mean no more HopenChange? Good lord, what was Porkulus and ObamaCare the result of anything but the ultimate in D.C. insider arm-twisting and buy-offs. Consider the lesson well learned, sir.

It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

We love this guy. He is the ultimate politician. No sooner than he admits Porkulus was a policy failure, he proceeds to gratuitous back-patting with respect to his perception of how well he handled policy matters.

And as Democratic candidates flee from obvious policy success stories like Porkulus, ObamaCare and cap and trade, we can't help but notice that Obama is doing some distancing himself and chalking it up to the fact that it all was not adequately explained to the unwashed masses, i.e., you ungrateful dumb-asses out there.

Exit question: For those of you out there who don't believe he is capable of tacking to the center, (outside of cap and trade) what's left to be done?