[Coda]

That's not true at all, Lucid. Obama WAS able to reach across party lines to get things done during the first two years of his term. Obama is REMARKABLY centrist. (That's what I like about him. I would never have voted Democrat before 2008. And yes, I'm old enough to have voted in that absurd 2000 election.)

The problem is the Republican party. As the Democrats have been moving towards the center, the Republicans have been reacting by moving increasingly to the right and becoming increasingly radical. Once the Republicans took control of the House in 2010 that they INTENTIONALLY chose to do everything they could do to block Obama regardless of how bipartisan his measures were. This isn't speculation: there's plenty of sound bites and news reports that show that this was an explicit plan. It's politics at its worst and you can't blame the President for the opposing party conspiring to do everything possible to make him look bad.