It's all right here, where he writes:

"I'm not sure I buy my colleague Josh's assessment about Washington being arrayed against Obama. Obviously there are institutional impediments to change of any kind, whether it's Reagan's or Obama's..."

That's a phony equivalence... There really aren't a lot of institutional impediments currently in place that would counteract Reagan style change.  We just went through 8 years of "tax cuts are the answer to everything," which is basically the Reagan economic doctrine (minus the Volcker strong dollar stuff that you can't credit to Reagan) so there really aren't institutional impediments to anything like that -- the media gives at least equal weight to tax cut arguments and the media routinely characterizes stimulus spending as pork.

Fact is... there are impediments to what Obama is trying to do and those impediments exist because, since the Clinton years, a lot of the major Washington D.C. institutions, including the media, continue to give credence to already discredited Republican ideas.

Also, lets stop comparing Obama to Reagan.  The two presidents had very different values and goals.

I'll take Judd Gregg at his word -- he turned down the Commerce Secretary post because he has fundamental disagreements with Obama, especially about the stimulus package but also about the way government should handle and regulate businesses going forward.

Here's the problem -- we have parties for a reason.  We should expect fundamental disagreements of this sort.  Gregg was at least honest enough to realize that if he couldn't follow the President's lead, he had to get out of the way.

But Obama was wrong to have appointed him in the first place.  I've never been happy with the bipartisan cabinet idea.  You can't tell me that there's not a Democrat more qualified for commerce than Gregg is, after all.  So why not go with that more qualified Democrat, whoever he or she is?

I'm less concerned by Robert Gates at defense since he seems to be willing to follow Obama's orders and because it makes sense to have some continuity at the Pentagon while we're waging two wars.  But even there, I'm less than satisfied.

Ideas matter.  Democrats are Democrats and Republicans are Republicans because our ideas differ.  At the moment, we Democrats need to implement our ideas.  Everyone in the administration needs to support that.

The line right now is that we're eschewing partisanship and ideology for "what works."  But "what works" is just a polite way of saying that we're going to pursue Democratic ideas because that's what works.  Republican ideas demonstrably don't work and indeed caused our current crisis.

That's not to say that Republicans can't or won't find a lot to like in our ideas.  I love the Republican commitment to personal freedom, for example, I just don't think they really implement it all that well.  They, in turn, might realize that Obama's stimulus plan has hundreds of billions in tax cuts, just targeted differently than Bush might have.

I do think that going forward we need to rely on members of our own party to pursue our party's ideas.  We should always be trying to convince the Republicans to see our ideas in the best light and we should always make minor concessions in exchange for support but shouldn't forget that there are two parties for good reason (well, there should be more parties but that's another discussion).