President Obama seems increasingly resigned to spinning his wheels in Washington. Is his frustration justified?

In a speech at a California fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee last week, President Obama offered a remarkably candid assessment of how he has tried — and failed — to change Washington. Two paragraphs, in particular, stand out.

“I am frustrated, and you have every right to be frustrated, because Congress doesn’t work the way it should,” Obama said, describing a conversation with a disenchanted voter. “Issues are left untended. Folks are more interested in scoring political points than getting things done, not because any individual member of Congress is a bad person — there are a lot of good, well-meaning, hard-working people out there — but because the incentives that have been built into the system reward short term, reward a polarized politics, reward being simplistic instead of being true, reward division.”

“And as mightily as I have struggled against that, I told him, you’re right. It still is broken. But I reminded him that when I ran in 2008, I, in fact, did not say I would fix it; I said we could fix it. I didn’t say, ‘Yes, I can’; I said — what? . . . ‘Yes, we can.’ ”

Obama’s comments in California were the second time in a 24-hour period in which he expressed resignation to the political realities of Washington, more weary pragmatist than an optimistic change agent.

Earlier Thursday, speaking about the killing of nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., the night before, Obama started angry, but that emotion quickly faded to grudging acceptance.

“It is in our power to do something about it,” Obama said about the mass murders with guns in recent years. “I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it.”

Obama’s framing of his inability to change Washington is, not surprisingly, cast in the best possible light for him: I tried, but politics is so broken that not even I (and remember that Obama, like almost all politicians, has a very healthy self-regard) could fix it. I can’t make people do things they just won’t do. I can’t bend the system to work properly. No one can.

division.http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-hard-lessons/2015/06/21/56c07130-181b-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html?hpid=z5