Obama begins to understand what helped make Reagan successful at a being a leader: marketing, PR, and public opinion

Mike Allen's Playbook shares these excepts from this coming Sunday's NYTimes Magazine article "The Education of a President":

Obama reflects on what he called the “tactical lessons” of his first two years: He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat,” realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” and perhaps should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus. He said he and his team took “a perverse pride” in focusing on policy while ignoring the need to sell it to the country and that he realizes now that “you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”