Team Obama naivete - I am more than surprised

Honestly, I'm stunned. I never thought Team Obama was naive or stupid. They were, I assumed, smart professionals. Any talk about GOP enlightenment and cooperation was just a smokescreen for public consumption. Rahm Emanual was a knife fighter, not a fool.

I assumed that, until I read Krugman today (emphases mine) ...

Rahmism - Krugman - NYTimes.com

... Look: early on the administration had a political theory: it would win bipartisan legislative victories, and each success would make Republicans who voted no feel left out, so that they would vote for the next initiative, and so on. (By the way, read that article and weep: “The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today.” They really believed that.)...

Tell me it isn't so. Tell me they weren't so deluded about the Party of Torture. Tell me they weren't so deluded about the fragile, one foot over the cliff-edge, home of Beck and Limbaugh, American nation.

Give me evidence too, because this looks very bad.

I thought they were smarter than that.