George Packer:

Even before Obama was inaugurated, the incoming Administration had set a political trap for itself.

The Recovery Act was meticulously designed to favor the substantive over the splashy, but an unintended consequence was that its impact became nearly invisible.

Tom Perriello, freshman House Democrat:

The surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it's the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.

Packer:

This pride in responsible process is the closest thing to an Obama ideology.

Paul Begala:

But that's not where voters are right now. Citizens are angry and anxious about the economy, not about whether we're too uncivil or partisan or corrupt in our politics.

An aide:

One of the problems with this Administration is it has tried to have a grownup, sophisticated conversation with the public. [But] the President is having a very eloquent, one-sided conversation. The country doesn't want to have the conversation he wants to have.

Packer:

To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are the way they are and how they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images -- in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative.

One Administration official told me that the Obama team remained staffed with young campaign aides, was tightly controlled by a coterie of political advisers, and was devoted more to the President personally than to any agenda. "Ideas aren't that important to them," the official said of the senior White House staff.

Louis Menand:

Ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- ideas are social. Ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

Ideas should never become ideologies -- either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it ... [There is a need for] a kind of skepticism that helps people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-marketed society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seem to have become attenuated, and to have been replaced by more impersonal networks of obligation and authority. But skepticism is also one of the qualities that make societies like that work. It is what permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on.

David Kilcullen:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

k:

You want a return to civilized dialogue and respectful disagreement, but you'll have to forgive my cynical laughter.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.