Is Obama Serious?

In a question put to him during his Press Conference about the effect of the election on his Healthcare bill, Obama says that we "should not misread the election" and "the voters don't want to relitigate issues that have been discussed for the last two years."

Huh?

Isn't one of the purposes of an of election to control our besuited masters in Washington when they go to far?

Update:

Jonah Goldberg picks up on Obama's weird claim that it would be "relitigating the past" to dismantle a program that the people didn't want in the first place and which they repudiated the first nanosecond they had the chance:

During his press conference this afternoon, President Obama insisted that the American public doesn’t want to “re-litigate the past.” Roughly four minutes later, he insisted that he inherited the deficit, which got worse because of a recession he inherited, as well. Somehow Obama forgot to mention that he increased spending 23 percent, tripling the deficit in the process.


No wonder he doesn’t want to re-litigate the past.

Indeed, earlier in his remarks the president claimed that spending went up after he came into office solely because he and his party were forced to deal with a crisis. “Now, the reason was, it was an emergency situation. But I think it’s understandable that folks said to themselves, ‘You know, maybe this is the agenda as opposed to a response to an emergency.’”

No doubt the financial crisis came with significant costs for the taxpayer, but among the myriad things the president left out of the story was the fact that his pre-crisis top campaign priorities—healthcare, “green energy,” and education—what he called his “new foundation,” were his top post-crisis priorities as well. In other words, it was his agenda. For a year, as he relentlessly pushed a healthcare bill, against public opposition, his advisers kept telling the press that once he got his healthcare priority passed, he would “pivot” to focusing on jobs. So while the country bled jobs from its economic jugular, Obama crammed through an unpopular piece of legislation that wouldn’t fully kick into effect until 2014. He did not do so in secret. “A crisis,” his chief of staff explained numerous times, “is a terrible thing to waste.”

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

President Obama came close, but he still just cannot admit that his radical policies and their effects on the economy are the cause of his devastating political rebuke. For most of his press conference, an oddly depressed Obama voted present, as he all but said that the problems are mostly ours, not his — or at least not his agenda but perhaps an occasional inadequate communication.

In clingers fashion, he once more is talking down to us, explaining that we confused his necessary solutions with a bogeyman increase in big government, and so typically, in fright and ignorance, lashed out at his party. He is claiming the outrage grew from the same frustration that elected him, rather than arising precisely because of him and his agenda. In short, we are angry because his EU-socialist agenda is progressing too slowly and hasn’t delivered as promised — as it will in time. Perhaps then we will thank him for his proper big-government, big-spending solution.

He seems bewildered (for the first time?) that his popularity as a campaign rhetorician did not last when he became responsible for actual governance. For most of the press conference, a humbled but deer-in-the-headlights Obama half-heartedly argued that the populist outrage against his own massive debt, huge wasteful government, and elitism was really outrage against the economy he inherited, an outrage that he shares. We don’t know it, the president hints, but we are still angry at the Bush years, and yesterday mistakenly took our wrath out on Obama’s methodical, albeit too slow, efforts at recovery. In short, there was little admission whatsoever that Obama’s message and the way he pushed it turned off millions — there was no repentant Clinton, circa autumn 1994, here; instead, a shocked Obama who seems hurt that we do not appreciate him.

I don’t think the American people — who just last week heard their president boast that Republicans had to sit in the back seat, and that Latinos should punish their Republican “enemies,” and who have now given him the greatest midterm putdown in over a half-century — suddenly will pay much attention to his calls for an end to the old divisiveness.