-----
After the president signed a controversial bill that most economists believed would worsen a sharp economic slowdown, a former admirer wrote that he
had surrendered everything for nothing. He gave up the leadership of his party. He let his personal authority be flouted. He accepted a wretched and mischievous product of stupidity and greed...Why? The pundit probed for the President's tragic flaw:
He has the peculiarly modern, in fact, the contemporary American, faith in the power of the human mind and will, acting through organization, to accomplish results...[but] the unreasonableness of mankind if not accounted for in [his] philosophy...in the realm of reason he is an unusually bold man; in teh realm of unreason he is, for a statesman, an exceptionally thin-sknined and easily beweildered man...He can face with equanamity almost any of the difficulties of statesmanship except the open conflict of wills.
