Give it time, say the East's sages, and what's bleak will brighten:
One Democratic operative ... said the debt ceiling debacle, which damaged Obama’s approval ratings, convinced the White House that its previous strategy of compromise and flexibility — that quest for a political middle passage to woo independents — was pointless.
The paradox, just to continue our Eastern philosophical theme, is that Obama's evolving argument throughout the debacle was, in actual fact, rapidly winning over the independent mind; it was coming to see not only the GOP's brutishness, but the economic incongruity of slashing federal spending in the grips of so much recessionary joblessness.
Yet just as there indeed exists a "cultural lag" (as coined in the 1920s by sociologist William Ogburn) to modernist developments, so there's a polling lag to political developments.