President Obama: "Vote for Me and Democrats Up and Down the Ticket"

"Obama’s plea that he 'can’t change Washington from the inside' isn’t a surrender. It’s a declaration of war." That's now the subtitle for William Saletan's article regarding the controversy Mitt Romney has tried to manufacture regarding President Obama's point "that you can’t change Washington from the inside" during Thursday's Univision town hall. Saletan begins his rebuttal of Romney's self-serving interpretation by quoting President Obama more fully:

Barack Obama: The fact that we haven’t been able to change the tone in Washington is disappointing. We know now that as soon as I came into office, you already had meetings among some of our Republican colleagues saying, “How do we figure out how to beat the president?” And I think that I’ve learned some lessons over the last four years, and the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside. That’s how I got elected, and that’s how the big accomplishments like health care got done, was because we mobilized the American people to speak out.