President Obama seems eager to stay on offense against Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as his spokesman counter-attacked after Ryan responded to Obama’s denunciation of his budget.
“In response to [Obama’s] detailed, fact-filled critique of his GOP budget, Rep. Ryan offers fact-free boilerplate,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today.
“History will not be kind to a president who, when it came time to confront our generation’s defining challenge, chose to duck and run,” Ryan said in a statement this afternoon. “The president refuses to take responsibility for the economy and refuses to offer a credible plan to address the most predictable economic crisis in our history.”
Obama called Ryan’s budget “a Trojan horse” today. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” the president told reporters in a lengthy assault on Ryan’s budget. “It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.”
Obama’s failure to propose a budget embraced by Democrats undercuts his attack, though. “It’s clear the president’s not serious,” Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. told The Washington Examiner last week. “His own party won’t even touch his budget . . . the Democrats won’t even show their hand with a budget. I really think it’s disgraceful.”
