Projection is in the DNA of the smugly arrogant. Obama and his advisers thus see the broad middle of the country as if it were MSNBC’s audience and vastly overestimate how turned off Americans are by the president’s detractors. Many of those detractors come from the actual broad middle. At the moment, independents are a lot more alarmed by Obama and his radical base than by his opponents.

The president’s problem is that impeachment talk has not arisen in a vacuum or been confined to the tea-party fever swamp of his imagination. It has been catalyzed by his flagrant violations of law and derelictions of duty. Disquiet has descended on a society that sees the rule of law devolving into executive caprice. On the world stage, it has become dangerous to be America’s ally — better to be Putin, Hamas, or the Taliban. There is a widening public recognition that the president’s vow to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” was not just campaign rhetoric. He really meant it.

Moreover, the public senses that impeachment is not, as in the Clinton days, being pressed by partisans heedless of public opinion. It is being considered — with patent reluctance — by an increasing number of concerned Americans who are offended by Obama’s aggressive lawlessness and have run out of other ideas for stopping it.

As Faithless Execution posits, that aggressive presidential lawlessness should be our focus. Of course impeachment has to be a part of this consideration.