Obama: Hey, Let's Talk About the Debt This Week

All that Obama's obnoxious press conference last week accomplished was shaming Harry Reid into bringing the Senate into session this week. You see, they had to be here to work on the debt Libya, though now that's not going to happen either. The reason the Senate can't work on the debt deal is there's no public proposal in the form of a budget from either Obama or Senate Democrats. But appearances must be maintained and all.

So today Obama called the press in for a political commercial statement to announce he's invited the bi-partisan group of congressional leaders from both houses to meet on Thursday. This is of course an exciting change from last week when his spokesman said meeting with Republicans wasn't worth it.

Today's performance was shorter than last week's but just as annoying. For Obama, who has no public plan and voted against raising the debt ceiling as a Senator, to lecture anyone about "kicking the can down the road" and the need to solve the problem sooner than later is beyond hypocrisy.

All last week and today's appearances were about is politics. Obama wants to be seen as the adult in the room a lot more than he wants to actually be the adult in the room.

One thing to keep in mind though...Obama's statement today was a political commercial plain and simple. He got it covered as big news simply because he's the President and that ability to drive events and get you spin out goes with the job. Just something to keep in mind when it comes time to dish out credit or blame.

Related enough...David Brooks kindly provided Democrats with their talking point of the day by saying the Republicans are being irresponsible for not taking Obama and the Democrats deal saying it, "is the mother of all no-brainers".

Paul Ryan begs to differ.

"If you take a deal like that, you're necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need to lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes, without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody's tax rates and you keep people's tax rates high. And you take the pressure off Congress to cut spending."

Ryan said he hoped that no debt increase without spending cuts remained the Republican position going into another work week.

"I do believe that we will reinforce that position in the House — I can't speak for the Senate, but in the House. We're not going to go down this path of taxing people," he said.

This probably deserves more attention but I'll put it here for now: Obama's "recovery" sucks compared to other post-recession recoveries. It's like his policies failed and he's doing damage to the country.

posted by DrewM. at 05:39 PM

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