A day after an obscure Republican captured the safest Democratic seat in the U.S. Senate, President Obama offered this explanation: "a mistake of mine [was] the assumption [that] if I just focus on policy ... people will get it." How's that for self-criticism? He takes himself to task for overestimating the public.

This sounds like arrogance, but its root is ideology, an ideology that explains the paradox at the heart of Obama's approach. Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne describes it: "He pledged to change the tone in Washington and restore  amicable relations between the parties. But he also promised to accomplish large things ... [There was a] contradiction ... between Obama's commitment to sweeping change and his soothing pragmatism."

In adopting this self-contradictory stance, Obama was being neither a knave nor a fool, but rather reflecting his formative political identity as a "community organizer." He followed this calling immediately after college, and when he later turned to electoral politics, it was, according to his wife, Michelle, as a "community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change."

"Community organizing" did not mean, as some have  asserted, merely working for a neighborhood NGO. Rather, it was a strategy of 1960s radicalism formulated by Saul Alinsky for the avowed goal of "revolution." Its premise was the Marxian notion that the masses often suffer from "false consciousness" which deters them from overturning the system. This theory was updated in the 1960s by Herbert Marcuse who claimed that consumer culture and "repressive tolerance" kept people from realizing what they really needed.

Community organizers aimed to bring people into touch with their true interests by encouraging them to demand even small things. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls knocking on doors in Chicago slums asking residents if there wasn't something he could help them fight for.

Although he is surely no kind of Marxist today, Obama's continued belief in this notion of false consciousness underlay his most notorious faux pas of the 2008 campaign, the comment that voters in economic distress "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

Thus, the key to the incongruity between Obama's promises to bring us all together and his determination to forge dramatic change even in the face of voter skepticism is the conviction that the doubters are merely people who have yet to recognize their own interests. "Once we get this done," said the President of his health care plan before the Massachusetts upset, "the American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like."
 
Now, they may never get that chance. But there is still time for Obama to salvage his presidency. To do it, he must discard the mental  furniture left from his "community organizer" days. Americans may want change, but not radical change—and for good reason. Obama has a lot of unlearning to do, and the place to start is by banishing the idea that ordinary people don't know what they truly need. Only  then will he begin to "get it."