So if I understand you correctly, since you didn't get everything you want already (plus a few bonuses) it's a better idea to give control back to those who oppose anything and everything we're even trying to do and have made rolling back the beginnings of the gains we've begun their central campaign point.

Better, I think, someone who is imperfect yet making efforts than people who are diametrically opposed to whatever I stand for and actively working against not only what I believe in, but also the entire society in which I live.

I simply don't understand the depths of your delusion.  And I'm not sure I'm even willing to try.

I like the two-part electoral strategy we're getting here. One part emotional motivation: i.e. 'I'm too good for you snivelling morons' contempt, and one part rational incentive, i.e. 'if you don't give us the majority, I'll go and gut SocSec and Medicare with Paul Ryan... just out of spite'.

Utter genius!

... or retarded.

one of those two.

Your title, by the way, is perfect, stardust.  On the money.  It (painfully) says it all. 

Thinking back at reading the original Times interview, I do recall another statement that intrigued me.  During the past two years, I held Rahm Emanuel in disdain as a manipulative snake, willing to sell-out his mother if the price was right.  Somehow, the interview made me sense that Rahm was the only "man-guy" in Obama's inner circle.  I almost get the sense that he was always pleading for Obama to "kick ass and take names."  He, finally, used the governor-thing as an escape mechanism.

Reading your post and learning that he was today urging Democrats not to get discouraged I am beginning for the first time to dislike the guy.  Until now I've been sympathetic to him personally because he does have a truly impossible job, even while perceiving one "substantively right, politically hard" decision after another to be just the reverse (Clinton said the same things at times; I'm not sure if was deceiving himself or his listeners more.)  I mean, how much political courage does it take to capitulate to the fatcat interest groups instead of confronting them where he thinks they are wrong?  

Democrats are discouraged because they have been expecting him to advocate and defend his party's values.  Instead he half apologizes for them and makes a show of trying to reject them for the vanity points a Democratic President can get in the media for appearing to be a "new Democrat".  It turns out that, far from asserting the historic progressive values that our party (and Teddy Roosevelt earlier last century on some domestic issues) has advanced, to the lasting benefit of our country, he at times does not even appear to respect them. 

He is turning out to be as ineffective an advocate in a governing role as he was a compelling advocate in his 2008 campaigning role. (He has realized of late that he is in another campaign.  But he is fighting an uphill battle to try to win the attention, let alone the support, of some of the people who helped him get elected and are disgusted with what they've seen so far.)  He is an admirer of Lincoln.  In the white hot fires he had to walk through, Lincoln recognized and seized opportunities that presented themselves to make desperately needed choices unavailable through the conduct of normal politics.  On fateful issues, he didn't try to split every difference or imagine there was some way he could please everyone.  And just because he included rivals and even enemies among his own Cabinet does not mean he entertained illusions about the extent they would meet him part way or provide him with cover.  

He says Democrats are congenital pessimists.  He might find that if he scratched the surface of a seeming congenital pessimist he might find a wounded citizen activist idealist whose commitment, effectiveness and passion, so much in evidence during the campaign, might surprise him. 

I admit to my doubts on this last point.  Democratic activists feel so beaten down, dissed and sold out by party professionals and some candidates and officials they've helped elect over decades now that there may be a certain numbness that has set in, whereby the words have become increasingly hard to believe.  The cynicism that has set in is very much evident in the progressive blogosphere and may at this point be increasingly hard to overcome.  It's not a healthy situation where there is the degree of mistrust of the true commitments of candidates who express strong support for progressive values and policies as there appears to be to me at this time.

Well, there is a lot here.  But let me just focus on the beginning of the title.  Navel gazing is derogatory term used to describe someome who is utterly focused on them inner spiritual universe without any regard to world outside themselves.  Reading this interview as well as the rolling stone interview (which I agree with one of the commenters was a real soft ball pitch of an interview), shows me a president who is, if anything, overly sensitive to the world around him.  Now in one your last comments your problem is really not he is navel gazing but that he doing this "odd faux-self-examination."  I would say, however, that having a president who is willing to reflect and admit, not only to himself, but to the public where he made mistakes is a good thing, and definitely refreshing. As this quote from the interview indicates, Obama may be doing a lot of things but he isn't navel gazing:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them. 

And if you recall, when we initially unveiled what the Recovery Act would look like — in fact, that a third of it was tax cuts — Mitch McConnell actually was, as he phrased it, pleasantly surprised that sort of traditional Republican idea had been included. But very quickly that pleasant surprise turned into attacks on the infrastructure or the aid to the states or what have you.

I would have told Barack Obama back in 2009 that just be warned, structuring the tax cut the way we did, where people basically got a small bump in their paycheck every two weeks, was the right thing to do economically, but politically it meant that nobody knew that they were getting a tax cut. And in fact what ended up happening was six months into it or nine months into it, people had thought we had raised their taxes instead of cutting their taxes.

My point here of focusing on this "navel gazing" facet is two-fold.  One is that we all have, including myself, have some narrative we want to validate.  We will take things such as this interview and use to build that narrative, even though someone else can come in basically prove the opposite if so motivated. In reading this and the Stone interview, I don't see a president who has waved the white flag, but one that is trying to achieve the possible steps forward, rather than get nowhere while taking principled stands.

There is a quote in the Stone interview which brings up the point that is the second reason for the "navel-gaze"

I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized you and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now. I could have taken certain positions on aspects of the financial regulatory bill, where we got 90 percent of what we set out to get, and I could have held out for that last 10 percent, and we wouldn't have a bill. You've got to make a set of decisions in terms of "What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to just keep everybody ginned up for the next election, or at some point do you try to win elections because you're actually trying to govern?" I made a decision early on in my presidency that if I had an opportunity to do things that would make a difference for years to come, I'm going to go ahead and take it.

Now this is definitely a legitimate ground for debate to say he could have gone for those fights and won, that he is just making an excuse for giving into the wealthy special interests.  But what I see in both of these of these interviews is a president who is attempting to articulate both what he trying to do and how he is approaching it in given political environment. 

So Obama and his administration tried to govern with political and economic they were handed, we able to achieve some things, admitedly not perfect, and laid the groundwork for other things.  Or so goes one narrative.  And with this narrative it isn't surprising that Obama isn't out there trying to convinve people on the left that he isn't navel gazing nor waving the white flag, then or now.