Once you’re done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.

Therein lies the incongruity between progressive self-flagellants and the rest of us. What they consider introspectively virtuous and pious, we view as weak and self-loathing.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.