One elementary law of politics that the Obama campaign does not seem to have internalized is this: Don’t play against type. Last week White House spokesman Jay Carney brazenly asserted that President Obama’s spending binge never happened. “The rate of spending — federal spending — increase is lower under President Obama than all of his predecessors since Dwight Eisenhower, including all of his Republican predecessors.”

This was too much even for the usually worshipful press. The Associated Press issued a full-dress debunking, as did the Washington Post. Though Politifact, betraying its own unreliability, rated the administration’s claim “mostly true.” As the AP explained, the facially hilarious claim that Obama was the reincarnation of Calvin Coolidge arose from one columnist’s creativity with numbers. Rex Nutting, of Marketwatch, employed the usual Washington legerdemain of counting reductions in the rate of increase as cuts. He then assigned all of the spending in fiscal year 2009 to former President Bush’s account, the better to claim that Obama’s increase in the rate of spending after 2009 wasn’t all that huge.