We can't say we planned it, but  over at the Washington Post, blogger and columnist Ezra Klein weighs in on today's PubliCola Think Tank topic—"Has President Obama Failed Democrats?"

(We've got Democratic state Rep. Marko Liias praising the president and former Democratic state rep Brendan Williams trashing Obama for selling out.)

As for Klein, he posits that Obama's most controversial policies are borrowed from the conserative platform of the early 1990s:

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is—or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

Klein pulls out former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, current GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel, and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley as DC lawmakers who voted for '90s on legislation— including cap-and-trade and higher tax rates—that wasn't so controversial then, but outrages Republicans today.