Maybe He Isn't "Just Figuring This Out"

Jonathan Chait has what I generally think is a good piece of analysis about Obama's press conference, but at the end there was a line that I found interesting:

But it was a fascinating glimpse of the Trumanesque figure liberals have long waited to see emerge -- an Obama-ized Truman, castigating republicans for refusing to move to the center, but a Trumanesque figure all the same. Perhaps he is figuring out that a political and policy strategy based on the getting Republicans to meet him halfway isn't likely to work very well.

I know that I'm kind of a broken record when it comes to interpreting Obama's actions optimistically and/or charitably, but I would just like to dispute the "perhaps he is figuring out that..." interpretation. As I mentioned recently, I wrote quite a few months ago that in the wake of a legislative shellacking Obama needed to first sound like Clinton and then pivot to Truman. In other words, at the time I believed it would be a good overall strategy for Obama to spend quite a while giving every impression of wanting to make big, centrist, Grand Bargain compromises, even while he knew Republicans would never play along. Then, once the Republicans inevitably refused to meet him even one-hundredth part of the way, he could change his tone, and start reaming them out for their intransigence. A la Truman. Which is what he's done. Why is it that, if a twenty-year-old amateur like myself conceived of this strategy months ago, and it's exactly what the Administration did, that the professional political strategists in the Administration might not have been thinking this way from the beginning? Speaking as someone (who is a genuine left-winger) who suggested right after the Republican midterm victories that Obama take the strategy he has ultimately appeared to take, I think we should be a little less quick to assume that the Administration never understood that Republicans would never agree to anything one-tenth reasonable, etc. etc.? Isn't it just possible that they picked the same strategy I outlined for them, and that it's worked more or less perfectly? (Okay, that's unless we do end up hitting massive default and/or slashing spending the way the Tea Partyites seem to want, but still...)