Last Friday’s press conference by Barack Obama marked the end of an era. It was March 1st, the day that the sequester was set to kick in, and the President had just come from a meeting with congressional leaders in the Oval Office. On the eve of previous fiscal deadlines, the White House and Congress often found a way to reach a deal, even if it was only a patchwork solution or a temporary fix. Not this time.

A deal on the sequester was never really possible. Back in January, in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling for a few months, conservative House Republicans demanded that their leaders, John Boehner and Eric Cantor, allow the trillion dollars of cuts in the sequester to take effect. The White House, which wanted additional revenue as part of the replacement for the sequester, saw the G.O.P.’s all-cuts approach as a nonstarter, which means that sequestration is likely here to stay. (I wrote about the House G.O.P.’s road to the sequester in an article about Cantor last week.) When one considers that the alternative scenario was for House Republicans to precipitate a government default and a potential global financial crisis, the sequester cuts and the estimated three-quarters of a million jobs that they will cost this year are not so bad.

At Obama’s press conference, after he explained the negative effects of sequestration, he cast blame on the Republicans, and a reporter challenged his analysis. “It sounds like you’re saying that this is a Republican problem and not one that you bear any responsibility for,” she said to the President.

Obama seemed taken aback. “Well, Julie, give me an example of what I might do.”

Obama’s slightly testy response is worth considering. I don’t remember a President ever publicly expressing a similar sentiment. All Presidents come to appreciate the limits of the power of their office, and there are reams of quotes from Presidents privately expressing disdain for Congress’s unwillingness to bend to their will. But rarely do they ventilate such thoughts in public.

A little later, Obama, using a reference from “Star Wars” (with some “Star Trek” mixed in), went even further, giving a short lesson on the separation of powers:

I know that this has been some of the conventional wisdom that’s been floating around Washington, that somehow, even though most people agree that I’m being reasonable, that most people agree I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right. Well, they’re elected. We have a constitutional system of government. The Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate and all those folks have responsibilities…. This idea that somehow there’s a secret formula or secret sauce to get Speaker Boehner or Mitch McConnell to say, You know what, Mr. President, you’re right, we should close some tax loopholes for the well-off and well-connected in exchange for some serious entitlement reform and spending cuts of programs we don’t need. I think if there was a secret way to do that, I would have tried it. I would have done it.

The tendency of many Washington pundits, especially those who cover the White House, is to invest the Presidency with far more power that the Constitution gives it. The idea that the Presidency and Congress are co-equal branches of government is the most basic fact of our system, and yet it is often absent from political coverage of standoffs between the two branches. If only Obama would lead, this fiscal mess would be solved! If only he would socialize more with legislators the way L.B.J. did, his agenda would pass!

The pundits are not alone in assuming that the President is all-powerful. Indeed, the fact that Barack Obama now so appreciates the limits of his office and his lack of Jedi powers is rich with irony. As I’ve written about before, the premise of Obamaism— from his famous convention speech in 2004, through his primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, in 2008, right up until the later half of his first term—was that Obama was a politician uniquely suited to transform American politics by breaking through the polarization in Washington and bringing the two parties together.

Obama’s theme of post-partisanship and unity as a substitute for political ideology has always had its critics. Sean Wilentz, writing in The New Republic, in 2011, noted that Obama