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Wall Street Journal...
A
Leadership Default
The President blames House Republicans
for everything.
July 27, 2011
The
Obama Presidency has been
unprecedented in many ways, and last night we saw another startling
illustration: A President using a national TV address from the White
House to
call out his political opposition as unreasonable and radical and blame
them as
the sole reason for the “stalemate” over spending and the national debt.
We’ve
watched dozens of these speeches
over the years, and this was more like a DNC fund-raiser than an Oval
Office
address. Though President Obama referred to the need to compromise, his
idea of
compromise was to call on the public to overwhelm Republicans with
demands to
raise taxes. He demeaned the GOP for protecting, in his poll-tested
language,
“millionaires and billionaires,” for favoring “corporate jet owners and
oil
companies” over seniors on Medicare, and “hedge fund managers” over
“their
secretaries.” While he invoked Ronald Reagan, the Gipper would never
have used
such rhetoric about his opposition on an issue of national moment.
One
irony is that Mr. Obama’s demands
for tax increases have already been abandoned by Members of his own
party in
the Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid knows that Democrats running for
re-election next year don’t want to vote to raise taxes, so he’s
fashioning a
bill to raise the debt ceiling that includes only reductions in
spending. But
Mr. Obama never mentioned that rather large fact about Mr. Reid’s
effort.
Apart
from shifting blame for any debt
default, the speech was also an attempt to inoculate Mr. Obama in case
the U.S.
loses its AAA credit rating. He cleverly, if dishonestly, elided the
credit-rating issue with the debt-ceiling debate. But he knows that
Standard
& Poor’s has said that it may cut the U.S. rating even if
Congress moves on
the debt ceiling. Mr. Obama wants to avoid any accountability for the
spending
blowout of the last three years that has raised the national debt held
by the
public—the kind we have to pay back—from 40% in 2008 to 72% next year,
and
rising. This will be the real cause of any downgrade.
Speaker
John Boehner made clear in his
speech that the GOP doesn’t want a default but wants more genuine cuts
in
spending. Mr. Obama is betting his rhetoric will cause the public to
turn
against the GOP, but we wonder if voters will be persuaded by a man
whose
concept of leadership is the politics of blame.
Read
it at the Wall Street Journal
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