When President Obama finally got around Monday to offering public remarks on Friday evening’s decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the U.S. credit rating, his comments featured a little of everything. There was at the outset a snide retort that “we didn’t need a rating agency” to tell us we have an economic problem, followed by shifting blame for the downgrade to Republicans for their “insistence on drawing lines in the sand” and willingness to use “the threat of a default” as “a bargaining chip.” Obama then indulged in a crude denial of reality in saying “there’s not much further we can cut” in defense or domestic spending. There was a promise, finally, “to present my own recommendations in coming weeks on how we should proceed,” followed by yet more demands for additional federal spending on stimulus projects and unemployment.
It was, in short, vintage Obama: political double talk with a sprinkling of empty promises and baseless accusations of selfish intentions on the part of opponents. What it was not was presidential leadership. We have in recent days been highly critical on this page of mindless blame-shifting by leaders of both parties. Pointing fingers is counterproductive because the people who got us in this mess are in charge of getting us out of it.
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But presidents are supposed to lead, and the S&P downgrade presented Obama with an historic “teachable moment” in which he could have, for the greater benefit of the country, shed all pretense of political posturing and simply told the truth about the situation we are in. For example, he could have asked leaders of both parties in Congress to stop blaming each other and acknowledge that for the past decade, under a Republican and a Democrat president and with controlling congressional majorities from both parties, the federal government has been on an unprecedented spending binge that in Obama’s own word is “unsustainable.”
Since 2003, tax revenues flowing into the U.S. Treasury increased 20 percent, but spending went up 60 percent. As a result, the national debt exploded to 40 percent of the Gross National Product under President George W. Bush, and it has now reached 72 percent under Obama – and by all counts is headed much higher. But instead of speaking honestly about these matters, Obama declared yesterday that federal outlays cannot be cut further, thus aligning himself with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and others on the far left of his party who vow undying opposition to any further spending reductions.
Similarly, instead of taking his own advice about not putting ideological interests ahead of the nation’s good, Obama couldn’t resist repeating his clarion call to class warfare via “tax reform that will ask those that can afford it to pay their fair share.” But what is fair about demanding more from those to whom Obama presumably refers (the top five percent of all income earners) when they already pay more than 60 percent of federal income taxes? This isn’t leadership, it’s politics at its most base.
