Pundits agree: Obama only calls when he wants something

I don't know what to say about the vote on Trade Promotion Authority.  As a free-trade guy, I suppose I should be for it but the whole secretive nature of the process was disturbing.  Still, Obama wanted it and all his efforts were for naught.  I heard on the radio that Nancy Pelosi pretty much yeah-yeahed Obama until the time of the vote whereupon she torpedoed the whole thing.

Before the vote, VodkaPundit wrote the following:

The first is that Obama is unique in my political lifetime of having no real friends on Capitol Hill. He has ideological allies, in as much as progressives have an ideology beyond legislatively taking whatever they can get their hands on, but he has no friends. Thanks to Obama’s “my way or the highway” attitude, there’s no one in Congress he can call on the phone and say, “This is important to me. This is important to the country. How can we get this passed?” Obama has never cultivated those relationships, and now when he needs friends he finds there’s no one there to take his call, and he has to make an unscheduled appearance at a baseball game just to get some attention.

What makes this insight interesting is that a couple hours later, lefty pundit E.J. Dionne said almost the exact same thing on NPR - something like "you can't just go to a group of people when you want something and say 'I need you now'."