After many months of adoring media coverage and Democratic triumphalism, President Obama is now getting pasted by carnivorous columnists, angry activists, and House hotheads for every bow to bipartisanship, every deviation from liberal orthodoxy, and every tax-deficient nominee.

The problem is not that Obama is doing a bad job. For a new president beset with the most daunting combination of economic and national security nightmares in many decades, and with a recent run of bad luck, he’s doing his job quite well. Shepherding the $789 billion economic stimulus bill through the ideologically polarized Congress was no small feat. And for a man seeking to overcome determined Republican opposition without demonizing his adversaries, he hit the right notes (if too long-windedly) in his first prime-time presidential press conference on Monday.

The president’s political problem is that while he tries desperately to steer the storm-tossed ship of state off the rocks, partisans in both parties are reflexively acting out "a lot of bad habits built up here in Washington," as Obama told the press.

He stuck, despite a slip or two into tough rhetoric, to his conviction that fighting for his policy agenda and rejecting "the failed theories of the last eight years" does not require ascribing base motives to the opposition, disavowing any effort at compromise, or giving up on what some call his promise of "post-partisanship."

Obama also understands that a few party-line votes driven by clashing economic philosophies do not spell the doom of post-partisanship, which boils down to seeking common ground when possible and treating political adversaries with respect. Obama’s extraordinary overtures to Republicans, he explained, "were not designed simply to get some short-term votes. They were designed to try to build up some trust over time."

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

So said British statesman Edmund Burke in his famous 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol. Similarly, James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that voters should choose the candidates "who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society."

Wise counsel, albeit forlorn in today’s campaign world in which most people-especially primary voters-back the candidates who are most shameless in sacrificing their judgment to the voters’ opinions.

Burke and Madison might well have approved the judgment-focused questions that pro-Obama journalists have so furiously excoriated moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, for asking at the April 16 debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Washington Post‘s Tom Shales accused the two of "shoddy, despicable performances." The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg said that they had committed "something akin to a federal crime." The New York Times‘s David Carr called it a "disgusting spectacle."

Such commentators were especially livid that for much of the first half of the two-hour debate the moderators bored in on Obama’s gaffe about "bitter" laid-off small-towners who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them"; questioned his closeness to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright through many years of Wright’s anti-American, white-bashing rants; and brought up his more glancing connection to William Ayers, a University of Illinois professor who was a Weather Underground leader and (by his own admission) bomber almost 40 years ago.