"The fact that we haven't been able to change the tone in Washington is disappointing," Obama said, in response to a question about his greatest failure. "The most important lesson I've learned is you can't change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside."
What? Is he tapping out? Is the president begging for retirement?
Good grief. President Obama had a decisive victory in 2008 and a financial crisis too good to waste, for two years had Congressional allies in control of the legislative branch, and all along a press corps so fawning that they'd need to increase their cynicism by a couple orders of magnitude just to approach sycophancy.
But even President Obama, an extreme advocate of using the federal government to change things in his definition of hope, now thinks it is beyond him.
Really, however, President Obama was simply agreeing with me that the federal government is just too damn big.
UPDATE: Seriously, it's too damn big.
