Sometimes it's hard not to suspect that Politico reporters don't believe their own bullshit when they spin out narratives about who's up, who's down, how A perceives B, what C's prospects are, etc.
Today's nonsense question, posed by Glenn Thrush, is Does President Obama have a second-term strategy? Of course the implied answer is no. But the argument is self-cancelling from the get-go.
The implicit premise is that because Obama said during the campaign that his victory might break the GOP's fever of no-compromise opposition, and that fever has not in fact broken, the president is at loose ends. But that premise must be hedged, because of an inconvenient truth that Thrush acknowledges at the outset: Obam never expected that his reelection would end partisan gridlock: