Both the Wall Street Journal editors and the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson have pieces today addressing President Obama’s latest insight to a group of wealthy, Massachusetts Democratic donors, “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.”

Both miss one more instructive point about what Gerson calls Obama’s arrogance. It blinds him to the fact that, whether as a result of his thesis or merely consistent with it, voters deeply fearful over the financial meltdown of 2008 swept him into office.

And the correction in polling numbers indicates it is now, post-meldtown and mid-term, that they are actually straightening out their thinking. Leave it to Obama to assume instead they were lucid during the panic and are now panicking upon reflection.