"Come, let us reason together," said Lyndon Johnson (quoting, I believe, the prophet Isaiah). And so he did, although when Lyndon Johnson reasoned, you could usually hear the crushing of a few bones.
Barack Obama didn't use the Johnson phrase, but he did make it clear that he wanted to be the conciliatory President, the the centrist, the man willing to work with his worst enemy.
I suspect Obama himself is surprised and dismayed at how utterly he has failed in his campaign for centrist cooperation. I feel for him, but I for whatever it may be worth, I offer an insight. That is--obviously the Republicans have decided they have to destroy this guy, just as they tried so hard to destroy Bill Clinton. Since Obama doesn't seem to have a zipper problem, they have to look for something else.
Under this light, it is perhaps natural that they would plunge in for the kill so directly on what he seems to value most: his desire for a kind of post-partisanship. Perhaps this helps to show his weakness; perhaps it pulls the keystone out of a grand architecture. Or perhaps they are doing it because trying to destroy Democrats is just fun (I love the smoke of filibusters in the morning!).
But whatever the particular goal, perhaps a primary reason for the stonewall strategy ihe wants cooperation so much. It's an unprovable counterfactual, but could it be tht things might have gone better--even more collegially--if he had simply stuck his thumb in their eye?
[There might also be a larger strategical insight here, and if true, I hope it's not too late. Specifically, one thing you do as a good negotiator is to offer something you really don't care about very much as if you cared about it absolutely. Then you let your enemies wear themselves out fighting aginst something for which you really don't give a damn. I really don't think that was what Obama was doing with the collegiality ploy, but I kind of wish it had been.]
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