Did President Obama make mistakes in not being bipartisan enough during his first term? What could he have done differently to reach across the aisle?

He did everything he reasonably could to reach across the aisle. He campaigned on it; he tried to put it into action his first week in the White House. And when White House staffers met with Republican Congressional staff and said, “OK, let’s see what we can hammer out together,” they were told, “You don’t understand. We will never support anything you want to do.”

His failure was in persisting to try to work with them after it was clearly hopeless to everyone else. It was a waste of time. He should have ramrodded everything through Congress that he possibly could in those first two years.

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