Obama's Debt Ceiling Speech

A terrible speech that belied an inability to grasp the issues and showed that he is well aware that his poll numbers are tanking.  He went to his usual well and blamed Bush.  The only surprise there was that he seems to believe that the American people are buying any of that talk.  We know that Bush was not a fiscal conservative, but the President doesn't control the purse strings. In fact, Obama should be well aware of that given the current circumstances - Congress has told him NO to a war kinetic military operation in Libya, and told him NO when he wanted to increase the debt ceiling so he could borrow more money earlier this year.  It is beyond disingenuous to point the finger at Bush and say my predecessor racked up all this debt (especially when Obama was a Senator during part of that period) when Obama tried to go even further into debt faster.

Obama's invocation of Reagan - which is starting to become more of his modus operandi - was lame at best.  Following it with a claim to be seeking a balanced approach might have made more sense if he actually had put a plan on the table.  Telling Congress to "bring me a balanced approach" isn't going to work.  Everyone knows that in order to meaningfully address the debt problem we have to reduce spending  .  Raising revenue is only going to create the ability for the government to get into more mischief down the line - putting the government on a diet just so it can fit into its wedding dress is just for show, when we know right after the wedding it's back to business as usual.  Government has no self control.

Obama urged Americans to contact their congressmen and voice their desire to see a solution.  Well, he's just deflecting there, because looking at the polls, the American people are voicing their feelings.  Obama doesn't want to hear it right now.  He knows he's tanking, so he's in full-on campaign mode; he is saying whatever he thinks sounds good, but, as an old lawyer I tried a number of cases with used to say, "just because he's saying it doesn't make it true."