In early 2008, Krugman says that Obama’s post partisan unity shtick would fail, because the Republicans would crank up every dishonest, and quite honestly clinically insane, argument.

Well, today, Krugman says, “I told you so,” and he is right:

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Fundamentally, we have a president who wants people, including his opponents, to really like him, in a pathological kind of way, and he believes that he has the ability to make it so.

He is disastrously wrong.

If he wants any meaningful change, he needs to want his opponents to fear him, like LBJ….And, of course, avoid a military counter-insurgency in Asia, which is what did Johnson in politically.