To voters angry at Wash­ing­ton, Pres­id­ent Obama has an ex­plan­a­tion for the deep­en­ing of grid­lock, in­com­pet­ence, and zero-sum gain think­ing dur­ing his five-plus years in of­fice: It’s not his fault.

Not that fin­ger-point­ing solves any­thing, but Obama wants you to know that it was Re­pub­lic­ans and the me­dia who put his pres­id­ency on ice. At a fun­draiser in Chica­go on Thursday night, Obama said:

“You’ll hear if you watch the nightly news or you read the news­pa­pers that, well, there’s grid­lock, Con­gress is broken, ap­prov­al rat­ings for Con­gress are ter­rible. And there’s a tend­ency to say, a plague on both your houses. But the truth of the mat­ter is that the prob­lem in Con­gress is very spe­cif­ic. We have a group of folks in the Re­pub­lic­an Party who have taken over who are so ideo­lo­gic­ally ri­gid, who are so com­mit­ted to an eco­nom­ic the­ory that says if folks at the top do very well then every­body else is some­how go­ing to do well; who deny the sci­ence of cli­mate change; who don’t think mak­ing in­vest­ments in early-child­hood edu­ca­tion makes sense; who have re­peatedly blocked rais­ing a min­im­um wage so if you work full-time in this coun­try you’re not liv­ing in poverty; who scoff at the no­tion that we might have a prob­lem with wo­men not get­ting paid for do­ing the same work that men are do­ing. “They, so far, at least, have re­fused to budge on bi­par­tis­an le­gis­la­tion to fix our im­mig­ra­tion sys­tem, des­pite the fact that every eco­nom­ist who’s looked at it says it’s go­ing to im­prove our eco­nomy, cut our de­fi­cits, help spawn en­tre­pren­eur­ship, and al­le­vi­ate great pain from mil­lions of fam­il­ies all across the coun­try. “So the prob­lem “¦ is not that the Demo­crats are overly ideo­lo­gic­al — be­cause the truth of the mat­ter is, is that the Demo­crats in Con­gress have con­sist­ently been will­ing to com­prom­ise and reach out to the oth­er side. There are no rad­ic­al pro­pos­als com­ing out from the left. When we talk about cli­mate change, we talk about how do we in­centiv­ize through the mar­ket great­er in­vest­ment in clean en­ergy. When we talk about im­mig­ra­tion re­form there’s no wild-eyed ro­man­ti­cism. We say we’re go­ing to be tough on the bor­ders, but let’s also make sure that the sys­tem works to al­low fam­il­ies to stay to­geth­er “¦ “When we talk about taxes we don’t say we’re go­ing to have rates in the 70 per­cent or 90 per­cent when it comes to in­come like ex­is­ted here 50, 60 years ago. We say let’s just make sure that those of us who have been in­cred­ibly blessed by this coun­try are giv­ing back to kids so that they’re get­ting a good start in life, so that they get early child­hood edu­ca­tion.”¦ Health care — we didn’t sud­denly im­pose some wild, crazy sys­tem. All we said was, let’s make sure every­body has in­sur­ance. And this made the oth­er side go nuts — the simple idea that in the wealth­i­est na­tion on Earth, nobody should go bank­rupt be­cause some­body in their fam­ily gets sick, work­ing with­in a private sys­tem. “So when you hear a false equi­val­ence that some­how, well, Con­gress is just broken, it’s not true. What’s broken right now is a Re­pub­lic­an Party that re­peatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the eco­nomy, cre­ate more jobs, en­sure fair­ness, open up op­por­tun­ity to all people.”

Obama could be for­giv­en for try­ing to mo­tiv­ate his lib­er­al base with dis­tor­ted and over­heated rhet­or­ic, if it wasn’t clear that he ac­tu­ally means it.

The truth is that both parties are ideo­lo­gic­ally ri­gid. Un­bend­ing is the nature of a polit­ic­al parties, es­pe­cially when voters them­selves are sort­ing in­to “red” and “blue” teams; when com­puter-as­sisted re­dis­trict­ing and oth­er struc­tur­al factors en­cour­age par­tis­an­ship; and when the me­dia in­dustry is be­ing pushed (and is push­ing voters) to polit­ic­al ex­tremes.

Obama can reas­on­ably ar­gue that the Re­pub­lic­an Party is more ri­gid than the Demo­crat­ic Party. I would agree, and I don’t hes­it­ate to hold the GOP ac­count­able for po­s­i­tions that place the party on the wrong side of his­tory and demo­graph­ic trends.

But it’s my be­lief that Obama has over­stated his obstacles to suc­cess on taxes, im­mig­ra­tion, cli­mate change, and oth­er is­sues. The can­did­ate of un­bridled op­tim­ism in 2008 is now cyn­ic­al, bowed, and nearly beaten — a lead­er whose ex­cuse for fail­ure amounts to, I can’t lead be­cause Re­pub­lic­ans won’t let me. By the way, that is not a con­ser­vat­ive talk­ing point; it’s rooted in dozens of con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had in the past 17 months with Demo­crats.

Greg Sar­gent, a lib­er­al writer for the Wash­ing­ton Post, an­ti­cip­ated my re­sponse in a post Fri­day:

This will prompt the Green Lan­tern­ite pun­dits, who con­tin­ue to trace the prob­lem to Obama’s fail­ure to move Con­gress, to ar­gue that he is merely mak­ing ex­cuses for fail­ure. I would note, though, that in his re­marks, he also said the only rem­edy for the prob­lem is for Demo­crats to vote out Re­pub­lic­ans, which is to say, it’s on Demo­crats to fix by win­ning elec­tions “¦

Sar­gent makes a reas­on­able point. However, Demo­crats had con­trol of both cham­bers of Con­gress when Obama took of­fice in 2009, and most voters wer­en’t happy with the res­ult. Fur­ther­more, Sar­gent’s pre­scrip­tion for a bet­ter state of polit­ics is ex­actly what’s wrong with the sys­tem. “Win­ning elec­tions” is all the mat­ters in Wash­ing­ton. Obama prom­ised bet­ter.

Sar­gent’s col­league Dan Balz quoted Obama at the Chica­go fun­draiser in his Sunday column and reached a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion:

There is truth to the pres­id­ent’s claim that a fac­tion of the Re­pub­lic­an Party has forced House GOP lead­ers to res­ist com­prom­ise and that the party’s con­front­a­tion­al hard-liners have changed the rules on Cap­it­ol Hill. But there are Re­pub­lic­ans on Cap­it­ol Hill who are not ideo­lo­gic­al hard-liners and who lament what they re­gard as a pres­id­ent and White House seni­or staff who have grown in­creas­ingly with­drawn. They hear what Obama said Thursday and are of­fen­ded. They think he does not try to un­der­stand the reas­ons they dif­fer with his policies, be­liev­ing he simply prefers to por­tray them all as heart­less and cap­tured by the tea party.

Obama chafes at such even-handed ana­lyses. He dis­misses them as “false equi­val­ence” be­cause the pres­id­ent won’t be happy un­til every news story casts him as the hero and Re­pub­lic­ans as the vil­lains.

In polit­ics and in every­day life, rarely are both sides equally wrong, which is why journ­al­ists shouldn’t draw false equi­val­ence. Balz is an ex­ample of how to meas­ure blame fairly, not ne­ces­sar­ily equally.

Rarer still is one side 100 per­cent right, which is why Obama is guilty of false pur­ity. Obama’s in­tel­lec­tu­al dis­hon­esty has pre­ven­ted him from learn­ing on the job, which is what’s re­quired of great pres­id­ents — the kind who over­come obstacles that oth­ers whine about.