“What if we were wrong?” Obama said, sitting opposite me in the Beast. “Wrong about what?” I asked. For days, we had been trying to deconstruct what had happened in the recent election. Obama had complained he couldn’t believe that the election was lost, rattling off the indicators—“Five percent unemployment. Twenty million covered. Gas at two bucks a gallon. We had it all teed up!” Now he told me about a piece he had read in The New York Times, a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity is to people, that we had embraced a message indistinguishable from John
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