President Obama’s greatest need is to escape the ideological grip of congressional Democrats and the liberal base of the Democratic party (they’re one and the same). But he either doesn’t recognize this or, as a conventional liberal himself, isn’t so inclined. This self-inflicted difficulty has put Obama in worse political straits than President Clinton faced after the Republican landslide of 1994.

Certainly there was nothing in Obama’s State of the Union address last week to indicate he understands the fix he’s in or has devised a credible way to get out of it. His message, though he didn’t put it in quite these words, was that he’d rather fight for unpopular liberal policies than switch to broadly appealing centrist ones. 

A bad omen for Obama and Democrats was the pleased-as-punch response of Capitol Hill’s top Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It makes my job a little easier than if he were moving to the middle and picking up people,” McConnell says. “I naïvely thought he was going to do a course correction.”

McConnell characterizes the Obama strategy as: “Ignore the public, we know what’s best, full speed ahead.” The practical effect is to yield the political high ground to Republicans. “He can call us the party of no till he’s blue in the face,” McConnell says. “It depends on what you’re saying no to.”

When the president had lunch with television anchors at the White House the day of the speech, he minimized his political distress. Were the rate of unemployment two points lower, he’d be in fine shape, Obama suggested. That’s probably true. And if pigs had wings they could fly. 

Since the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts on January 19 and the collapse of Obama’s domestic agenda, the parallels between Obama now and Clinton in 1994 have come into sharp focus. The president, by the way, told the anchors Republican Scott Brown won because he was the better candidate, not because he made opposition to Obama’s policies the centerpiece of his campaign.

To save his presidency after his stiff rebuff in the midterm elections, Clinton lurched to the political center. He adopted a strategy of “triangulation” that involved painful compromises with Republicans, who had captured the House and Senate. It worked. Clinton glided to reelection in 1996, defeating Republican Bob Dole by 7 points.

Though it’s rarely acknowledged, Clinton’s most significant successes in the White House were all in conjunction with Republicans: the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, and balanced budget legislation in 1997 that included a cut in the capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent that spurred the financial boom and budget surplus of his second term.

For Clinton, creating daylight between his presidency and liberal Democrats was easy. They hadn’t been responsible for his election in 1992, nor was he ideologically tethered to them. In Obama’s case, separating himself would be hard. The liberal base was instrumental in his election, controls both houses of Congress, and may retain its majority after the 2010 midterms as well. As a politician, Obama is a creature of modern liberalism.

Even if Obama wanted to, it would be awkward for him to negotiate legislative deals with Republicans while liberal Democrats control Congress. And it would be regarded as a betrayal if he vetoed a Democratic bill. I can’t recall a recent example of a president vetoing a measure passed by his own party. Obama’s veto threats in the State of the Union weren’t taken seriously by Democrats or Republicans. 

At the core of Obama’s trouble is a misreading of the 2008 election. He and Democratic liberals interpreted it as a mandate for an era of liberal lawmaking and governance in a newly minted center-left America. And they set out to create that era with sweeping initiatives on health care, energy and the environment, and the economy.

They were wrong, as everyone but the most unswerving or fogbound liberal now understands. America is a center-right country politically and has been for decades. Pushing a liberal agenda for a year has cost Obama dearly. His public approval has fallen at a record rate (for a first-year president), and so has support for his policies.

You can read more at the above link. 
Your damn right he is no Bill Clinton.