Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains these two priceless paragraphs:

President Barack Obama pitched himself onto the political scene as a man who could rise above partisan politics, and despite presiding over a bitterly divided government, he is starting the 2012 campaign still casting himself as that guy.

On a three-day midwestern bus trip, Mr. Obama tried to portray himself as an outsider. “The only thing that’s holding us back right now is our politics,” he said three times at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday. “That’s the message we need to send to Washington,” he said, as if he wasn’t part of Washington.

The mind reels at the brazenness of this strategy.

Mr. Obama appears to be running as if this is 2008, not 2012 — and as if the enormous damage of his presidency will be stuffed down a memory hole. Now as much as some of us would like to forget the last two-and-a-half years, the memories are indelible. And what’s actually holding us back right now isn’t our politics; it is, in large measure, the president’s failed policies.

As for sending a message to Washington, earth to Obama: You are Washington. Indeed, you can’t get any more Washington than working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in the West Wing, in the Oval Office.

The president is the personification of the city he seeks to run against.

There is a term in psychiatry for what Mr. Obama is attempting to pull off: dissociative disorder. It’s considered to be a coping mechanism, when the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self.

Now while the Obama presidency is certainly being traumatized these days — a 26 percent approval rating on the economy will do that to a fellow — I don’t for a moment think that the president actually suffers from this disorder. But what is revealing is that he’s acting as if he does — and he’s pursuing a strategy that assumes the public will let him get away with it.

They won’t.