It sounds like a joke: President Obama has gotten so partisan that even Karl Rove is taken aback:

His campaign promised post-partisanship, but since taking office Mr. Obama has frozen Republicans out of the deliberative process, and his response to their suggestions has been a brusque dismissal that “I won.”

[ . . . ]

Mr. Obama has hastened the decline of Republican support with petty attacks on his critics and predecessor. For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush. Starting with his inaugural address and continuing through this week’s overseas trip, the new president’s jabs at Mr. Bush have been unceasing, unfair and unhelpful. They have also diminished Mr. Obama by showing him to be another conventional politician. Rather than ending “the blame game,” he is personifying it.

The question remains: Why? After all, Obama had the perfect opportunity to peel off chunks of the Republican caucus, create dissention (between those wanting to join with him and those insistent on opposing him at all costs), and redefine the Democratic party as a broad-based centrist one which deprived the GOP of any real operating room. That’s the picture — or one of them — he painted in the campaign when he spoke about going line-by-line through the budget, reaching out to religious voters and promising to expand the Army. (Yeah, we’ve certainly come a long way.)

One school of thought suggests that Obama is deep down a far-left ideologue and would rather achieve his agenda than build a lasting coalition. He has to hurry to beat the clock to the 2010 election and wants to do everything he can to tick off the items on the liberal wish list. In this scenario, his moderate language and bipartisan themes, as central as they were to his campaign, were essentially deceptive. He’s not a centrist and has no interest in governing as one.

Another school of thought suggests that he hasn’t figured out how to set the agenda and put Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in their place as supporting players. They crafted the stimulus and insisted on the earmark-stuffed omnibus spending bill. He passively went along because he lacked the fortitude or skill to cut them off at the pass. The problem with that theory is that his budget — crafted by him, not Pelosi or Reid — was extreme, vastly increasing the size of government, raising taxes, embracing cap-and-trade (and with it a huge energy tax), and setting up a healthcare slush fund for which the fine print would be filled in later.

When you look at his actions it is hard to conclude that Obama is anything but a committed ultra-liberal who sees himself as revolutionizing the relationship between citizens and government. And when you throw in his “can’t we all get along” diplomacy and his unwillingness to assert America’s unique role in the world, one gets the sense we elected a throwback to the 1970s, not a groundbreaker. (More George McGovern and less Bill Clinton than many imagined.) That’s bound to be divisive since a large majority of the electorate isn’t ultra-liberal. It remains to be seen whether it is also a losing formula, both economically and politically.