I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist [...]

In the last few days, several bloggers – among them Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein — have written faulty defenses of the health care bill. They used theoretical, counterfactual alternatives in defense of the health care legislation they’ve supported, calling to mind Voltaire’s classic, Candide. In it, Voltaire heavily mocks the extreme optimism of Pangloss, [...]