President Obama's level of detachment from reality is on display in a long article for to appear in next weekend's Sunday NYT magazine, as excerpted in Politico's Playbook:

PETER BAKER cover story of Sunday's N.Y. Times Magazine, "Education of a President," includes interviews with President Obama and nearly two dozen White House officials, talking about lessons of the last two years and what comes next after the election. Behind-the-scenes photos from a day in the life of the president were shot by Ashley Gilbertson, who had access as Obama went through a day of meetings and events.

--In the interview, the president predicts he'll be able to work with Republicans after the election: "It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible, either because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn't work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way."

He reflects on what he called the "tactical lessons" of his first two years: He let himself look too much like "the same old tax-and-spend Democrat," realized too late that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects" and perhaps should have "let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts" in the stimulus. He said he and his team took "a perverse pride" in focusing on policy while ignoring the need to sell it to the country and that he realizes now that "you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."