Backfire.

An interesting conclusion in this article in The New Republic about how the efforts of the President and his advisers to paint him as above all the political wrangling not only disappointed his supporters once he was elected because of the silly and all-too-long commitment to "bipartisan" approaches to every issue but also set him up as the perfect target for sadly successful right-wing attacks:

[E]fforts to elevate Obama above the hurly-burly of Washington politics have been disastrous. Obama’s image as an iconic outsider has become the screen on which Fox News, the Tea Party, radicalright bloggers, and assorted politicians have projected the image of him as a foreigner, an Islamic radical, and a socialist. He has remained “the other” that he aspired to be during the campaign, but he and his advisers no longer control how that otherness is defined.