Since we’re down memory lane, one of my friends from the Cambridge, Mass days was an interesting ex-Special Forces captain, a West Point, Harvard Business School alumnus who was doing a doctorate at Oxford in history. The subject was whether Hitler could have won if he didn’t blunder on the Eastern Front, ceteris paribus (and leaving aside the fact that America would have had the bomb in 1945).

One problem with Hitler’s strategy on the Eastern Front was he turned everything into an existential question. The stand fast orders were essentially double-downs. Either you won big or you lost your shirt. This was a very bad strategy for Hitler because he did not have an unlimited amount of capital in this military casino. When he ran out of chips he wound up in the bunker.

This tendency to double down and turn everything into a referendum of change is an interesting one. Why does the President feel he needs to stake his prestige on Coakley? Is it because he absolutely has to have this health care bill when the electorate, if the polls are to be believed, hate it? Stand fast. Stand fast. Die in place. That’s how you create Stalingrads.

That’s not to say that the President doesn’t know how to readjust lines, but seems to do so very grudgingly and only at the margins. His Afghan policy seemed to demonstrate, not strategic patience, as Andrew Sullivan believed, but a kind of miser’s reluctance to part with even a small crumb of his political cookie.

My guess is that Barack Obama really seems himself as a “change agent”, not an administrator. The present holds no attractions for him. Coakley is important because she is a cobblestone on the path to change. Change is always in the future. I’m not sure this is an adequate reason for his inflexibility, but it’s one theory.