Obama has virtually never embraced any Republican ideas.

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During his Wednesday press conference reacting to the massive gains Republicans made in this year’s midterm elections, President Obama said that he still believes in the principle he espoused on the night of his election in 2008: that “We are simply more than just a collection of red and blue states — we are the United States.”

Could’ve fooled me.

There is something of the serial philanderer about Obama (metaphorically, of course). It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to keep saying the same thing year after year when your actions always cut to the contrary. That behavior eventually catches up, however, to even the most charming of cads.

What’s remarkable in 2014 is how much of a con job the Obama of 2008 has turned out to be. This was a candidate who ran almost exclusively on his ability to transcend conventional partisan politics, and yet he doesn’t have a single major bipartisan achievement to his name.

George W. Bush had No Child Left Behind. Bill Clinton had welfare reform. Ronald Reagan had a blockbuster deal with Tip O’Neil on Social Security reform.

Obama? Bupkis.

Despite the record, he still carries on as if he’s Solomon on the Potomac. During Wednesday’s presser, Obama repeatedly asserted that he’s open to good ideas from across the aisle. Ever the pseudo-pragmatist, he noted “I want to just see what works.”

That is a shopworn leftist trope, a head fake to make it seem as if the speaker is above petty ideological concerns and solely concerned with the mechanics of government. The evidence, of course, tells a different story.

Obama has virtually never embraced any Republican ideas. And if his tenure in office has been dedicated to the pursuit of “what works,” the White House is doing an awfully good job of concealing it.

Should we expect a new era of bipartisan cooperation?

No. The President spent a considerable amount of his press conference threatening to take executive action on immigration if congressional Republicans fail to act — a threat he reiterated even after being told that soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had said that such an offensive would “poison the well” for congressional-executive relations.

Obama’s blasé response was that Republicans are free to act to supplant any action of his they end up unhappy with, a stunning (because willful) misreading of the Constitution’s separation of powers. 

The absence of Congressional action is not a hall pass for presidential mischief-making. Inaction itself is an expression of legislative power — one over which Obama’s promised unilateralism would run roughshod.

One has to extend a certain respect to someone capable of practicing deception at such a refined level.

Watching Obama address the press corps, however, there was a nagging sense that he may have even fooled himself. He boasted about the country’s economic performance and improvements in health care — two fronts on which the public has turned decisively against him.

He proudly touted increased energy production (a real phenomenon, but one which his administration has actively sought to impede). And he described the voters’ message on Tuesday night as, “they just want us to get the job done.”

If the voters were so frustrated with gridlock in both parties, taking it out exclusively on Democrats was a peculiar way of expressing it.

In 2008, Obama and his fellow Democrats assailed George W. Bush for his stubbornness and his divisiveness. Two years prior, it bears noting — after a similarly brutal midterm — Bush had sacked his Secretary of Defense and completely rethought his strategy in Iraq in reaction to public disquiet.

Today, Obama steams ahead with no indication that he will make even minor adjustments after suffering a rebuke just as severe. It used to be a laugh line to quote Bush’s assertion that he was “a uniter and not a divider.”

By the time Barack Obama is done with Washington, however, Bush may look like a model of bipartisanship by comparison.