Is David Brooks right? Has Obama rejected Obamaism? The irony is that Brooks uses today’s column to repeatedly flagellate himself as a ‘sap’ who is gullible enough to believe in the president’s rhetoric about bipartisanship. For Brooks, the goal has always been bipartisanship. For Obama, bipartisanship was never more than a means. How do you get a bill passed through Congress when you don’t have enough votes to force it through on your terms? You compromise. You incorporate some of the opposition’s ideas. You give credit to those who cooperate with you.

The only alternative is to try to intimidate the other side into cooperating with you, but that’s hard to do when the other side is more vulnerable to losing in a Tea Party primary challenge than in the general election against a Democrat. It’s naturally somewhat difficult to find the exact line where bipartisanship passes from a goal to a necessity. Obama said he wanted to change how Washington works and work across party lines. That sentiment was rejected by the Republicans before he was even inaugurated.

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

David Brooks acknowledges this with the following statement:

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think.

When you put those two blockquotes together, it becomes clear that David Brooks belongs in the Justice League of America Hall of Fame for Wanking. His own party precluded the very possibility of true bipartisanship. They have engaged in an absolutely unprecedented level of obstruction. Despite this, the president continued to offer an outstretched hand. To some degree, he didn’t have much of an alternative if he wanted to sign any bills. Yet, he certainly could have taken a tougher line. He could have called the Republicans out for their cynicism, hypocrisy, and dishonesty long before now. He could have thrown bombs and stomped his feet and responded in kind to the over-the-top rhetoric about his socialism and his birth certificate and his Mooslim faith. He didn’t do that. It made most progressives go insane. Why was the president preemptively giving away his negotiating position? Why wasn’t he going after the Republicans the way they were going after him. Was the president a ‘sap’?

The president offered John Boehner a Grand Bargain, and John Boehner rejected it because it involved some tax hikes on rich people. Brooks responds that the president is abandoning bipartisan approaches.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

In a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, the president accomplished more in three years than any president since LBJ, but it wasn’t helping in the polls and he’d reached the end of what could be accomplished through compromise. The president would love to pass a jobs bill. He’d love to take a big bite out of the budget deficit, even if it involved significant pain for him with his base. But the Republicans won’t play ball, so now it’s a full court press for the American Jobs Act, which at least has the advantage of being wildly popular.

David Brooks might long for a country where a Democratic president only signs bills that Olympia Snowe thinks are appropriate. Well, we had that for two years, and the results were suboptimal but still praiseworthy. For the last year, however, we have lived in a country where the president can only sign things that the Tea Party thinks are appropriate. That has to change or our country is fucked. Maybe Brooks should focus his energies on that problem instead of the nonexistent problem he wrote about today.