Obama on "60 Minutes": "I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted..."

"... where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving that, you know, I haven’t fully accomplished that, haven’t even come close in some cases."

This sentence poses an interesting rhetorical conundrum. If your goal is to avoid constantly being in a slugfest and you are ever not in a slugfest, you have achieved that goal. You could even say you have fully accomplished it, since it was such a low bar, not being constantly in a slugfest.

But obviously Obama did not mean that, since he's confessing failure, though not complete failure. He hasn't fully accomplished what he wanted. But maybe looking at that elaborate, professorily built-up sentence, I'm seeing the opposite of my first reading, and I want to say that he has completely failed. If it's an on-and-off slugfest, it's really still a slugfest. Even a real-life boxing match has rounds and little rest periods. You can't claim to have partially accomplished a change in the slugfestiveness as long as the slugfestivities keep popping up.

The thing is: Our Professor-President has a way of stringing phrases along in what actually ultimately congeals into a sentence that is weirdly arranged but completely grammatical, that conveys the feeling of intelligence and thoughtfulness but — if you pull it apart — yields no significant meaning. But you're not supposed to pull it apart. Why would you do that? It was so lovely, so lulling... so likeable.