President Obama takes on the blame for the midterm shellacking. "The buck stops right here."

Courtesy of Politico:  

President Barack Obama is taking blame for the Democratic drubbing in last week’s midterm elections, saying “the buck stops right here at my desk.” 

“Whenever, as the head of the party, it doesn’t do well, I’ve got to take responsibility for it,” the president said in a wide-ranging interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation."

Obama also said one lesson from the midterms was that his party has to do a better job selling its policies. 

“We’ve got to reach out to the other side and, where possible, persuade,” he told host Bob Schieffer in the interview taped Friday at the White House before he left on a week-long trip to Asia. “I think there are times, there’s no doubt about it, where, you know, I think we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we’re trying to do and why this is the right direction.” 

I think this is bullshit.

I think the President is being very magnanimous by taking on the blame for something that ultimately is the fault of timidity by the Democrats and candidates who believed that if they hid from their progressive ideas, and the successes of this President, that it would make them more attractive to the voters.

I think if Democrats would have walked out among their  constituents with their chests puffed out with pride over what they had accomplished and sold it with the same fervor that Republicans used to sell us the Iraq war, many of them could have emerged victorious.

And at least if they lost they could still look at themselves in the mirror and say that they stayed true to themselves, true to the President, and true to their party.