Obama appears to be running as if this is 2008, not 2012 — and as if the enormous damage of his presidency will be stuffed down a memory hole.

◼ Obama’s Dissociative Disorder Ploy - Commentary Magazine

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains these two priceless paragraphs:

President Barack Obama pitched himself onto the political scene as a man who could rise above partisan politics, and despite presiding over a bitterly divided government, he is starting the 2012 campaign still casting himself as that guy.

On a three-day midwestern bus trip, Mr. Obama tried to portray himself as an outsider. “The only thing that’s holding us back right now is our politics,” he said three times at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday. “That’s the message we need to send to Washington,” he said, as if he wasn’t part of Washington.

The mind reels at the brazenness of this strategy.

◼ Campaigning as Mr. Outsider - President Obama, Touring the Midwest, Seeks to Portray Congress as the Problem - Wall St. Journal