Can Obama engage in 'self-critique and self-correction'?

Obama now faces a majority Republican House of Representatives, as well as a House and Senate figuring out how to deal with the tea party insurgency that upset establishment political plans for many races.

“Maybe some of the big Tea Party ideas will be as popular as the Tea Partiers claim them to be. We won’t know until Congress tries to enact them,” writes Frank Rich in the New York Times. “Nor will we know Obama’s true measure until he provides a coherent alternative of his own about how he intends to put Americans back to work and keep them in their homes. If he has such a plan, few, if any, Americans have any idea what it is.”

The White House bubble

“To do this, he’ll have to break out of the White House bubble he lamented again last week,” Rich writes. “He can no longer limit interactions with actual working Americans to photo ops on factory floors or outsource them to a ‘Middle Class Task Force’ led by Joe Biden. He must move beyond his Ivy League-Wall Street comfort zone to overhaul his economic team.”

Asked at his morning-after press conference Wednesday whether he felt any responsibility or remorse for the “shellacking” he acknowledged his party had taken, Obama said: “I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons. But I do think this is a growth process and an evolution.”

That led John Harris and Glenn Thrush at Politico.com to wonder whether Obama is capable of growth and evolution.

Even some of his sympathizers regarded Obama’s political setback as a “natural comeuppance for an exceptionally confident man who slipped into overconfidence,” Harris and Thrush write.

“Self-regard can blur into self-delusion,” they write. “According to many Obama supporters and skeptics alike, it is still to be seen whether Obama shares with his most successful predecessors a capacity for self-critique and self-correction.”

That would be Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Each in his own way overcame political setbacks. We’ll see if the same is true for Obama.

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