Michael Walsh explains the president’s game plan in the current negotiations over debt increases. The democrats are simply trying to blame Republicans for risking default, and doing everything possible to get a debt ceiling increase running past next year’s election in order to try to minimize their own vulerabilities on the issues of excessive spending and the deficit.

I liked his metaphorical comparison to the double dealing and intrigue in the Coen Brothers’ gangster movie Miller’s Crossing (1990). I guess the contrived and systematic insincerity must make Obama Bernie Birnbaum.

By now, the Obama “leadership” style should be blindingly apparent: Do nothing, lie in wait, and then counter-attack. Never present a plan if you can possibly help it, but deal exclusively in bromides and platitudes as you stake out the moral “high ground” and get ready to ambush the other guy. …

Meanwhile, have your media allies, talking parrots, and court lickspittles prepare the ground with standard-issue talking points — “The Tea Party Republicans are terrorists,” for example. …

Adamantly refuse to be pinned down about the specifics of anything, and have your platoon of Baghdad Bobs continue to insist (as good liberals always do) that up is down, black is white, and wishes are really horses, if not actual unicorns.

So the later Boehner walks into the trap, the quicker Harry Reid trumps him, and the sooner Obama can can declare for the umpteenth time that the time for talk is over, emerge as a hero — and get the debt-ceiling debate safely past the shoals of the next election, which is all he really cares about. Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, running for office is the only thing the Punahou Kid knows how to do.

Hat tip to Theo.

Not the greatest Country Western song of all-time, but its heart is in the right place.

I’m afraid that I think he is way, way “too young to remember when you could keep most of what you earned.” I’m too young to remember that myself, and I’m so much older than he is that it isn’t funny. But I did enjoy the “I’ll take my guns/My home on the range/I’ll take my Bible/You keep your change” bit. It brought to mind images of liberal friends turning purple.

Via Theo.

click to enlarge

Via Theo.

All you need to do is elect Barack Obama.

From Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee, A Brief History of President Obama’s Fiscal Record:

January 20, 2009
President Obama sworn into office

President tells the American people in his Inaugural Address: “Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Debt Held By Public = $6.31 trillion

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February 17, 2009
President Signs into Law the Spending Stimulus

The stimulus adds $821 billion in new spending according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The White House promises this infusion of spending and borrowing would keep unemployment rate below 8%. As millions of Americans are painfully aware, that promise was broken.

Debt Held by Public = $6.48 trillion

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February 26, 2009
President Issues FY2010 Budget

The President’s budget adds $2.7 trillion in new debt in FY2010 and imposes $1.4 trillion in new taxes.

Debt Held by Public = $6.58 trillion

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March 11, 2009
President Signs FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act

The massive spending bill includes 8,696 earmarks at a cost of $11 billion.

The spending bill adds $19 billion in new spending above the baseline – an 8.6% spending increase.

Debt Held by Public = $6.66 trillion

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April 29, 2009
Congressional Democrats Pass FY2010 Budget

The Congressional Democrats’ budget calls for a $2 trillion debt increase in 2010, and another 8.9% increase in non-defense discretionary spending.

The reconciliation process is abused to later pave the way for health care overhaul to be jammed into law.

Of note: this is the last time Congressional Democrats will bother budgeting.

Debt Held by Public = $6.85 trillion

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February 2, 2010
President Issues FY2011 Budget

The President’s budget more than doubles the debt; pushes the FY2011 deficit to a new record of $1.6 trillion; drives spending to a new record of $3.8 trillion in fiscal year 2011; and raises taxes by more than $2 trillion through 2020, under the administration’s own estimates.

Debt Held by Public = $7.85 trillion

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March 23, 2010
President Signs Health-Care Overhaul Into Law

The massive new law adds $1.4 trillion in new spending over the next decade, and over $2.5 trillion once the law is fully implemented.

Despite sluggish economic growth and high unemployment, the law imposes over $500 billion in new tax hikes. CBO Director Elmendorf would later testify that the law would reduce employment by roughly half a percent – a reduction of approximately 800,000 jobs.

Debt Held by Public = $8.18 trillion

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April 15, 2010
Congressional Democrats Decide Not to Do a Budget for FY2011

The 1974 Budget Act requires Congress to pass a budget each year by April 15.

In an unprecedented budget failure, House Democrats not only failed to pass a budget – they opted to not even propose a budget.

Debt Held by Public = $8.39 trillion

—————————————

July 21, 2010
President Signs Financial Regulatory Overhaul Into Law

In addition to heightened regulatory uncertainty, the massive new law adds $10.2 billion in new spending.

Debt Held by Public = $8.69 trillion

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February 14, 2011
President Issues FY2012 Budget

The President’s budget yet again calls for the doubling of the debt in five years, and tripling the debt in ten years.

The President’s budget spends $47 trillion over the next decade, imposes over $1 trillion in new tax hikes, and fails to address the drivers of the debt.

Debt Held by Public = $9.45 trillion

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April 13, 2011
President Delivers Speech on Deficit Reduction

The President appears to abandon his own budget by offering a ‘framework’ that calls for additional tax increases, defense spending cuts, and Medicare price controls – yet lacks sufficient detail to back-up claims of deficit reduction.

Debt Held by Public = $9.65 trillion

The decades roll by, many things change, but left-wing democrats and the results of the policies of left-wing democrats remain much the same.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Glenn Reynolds started polling yesterday on which other president Barack Obama most reminded his very numerous readers.

Jimmy Carter (no surprise!) came in first, with (currently) 63%. But number 2 was none other than Zaphod Beeblebrox (16%).

Poll

Results

James Pethokoukis suggests that the lights burned late on Friday at the White House and loud sounds of weeping could be heard by anyone nearby.

[Friday] night in a new report, Democrat-friendly Goldman Sachs dropped an economic bomb on President Obama’s chances for reelection (bold is mine):

Following another week of weak economic data, we have cut our estimates for real GDP growth in the second and third quarter of 2011 to 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively, from 2% and 3.25%. Our forecasts for Q4 and 2012 are under review, but even excluding any further changes we now expect the unemployment rate to come down only modestly to 8¾% at the end of 2012.

The main reason for the downgrade is that the high-frequency information on overall economic activity has continued to fall substantially short of our expectations. … Some of this weakness is undoubtedly related to the disruptions to the supply chain—specifically in the auto sector—following the East Japan earthquake. By our estimates, this disruption has subtracted around ½ percentage point from second-quarter GDP growth. We expect this hit to reverse fully in the next couple of months, and this could add ½ point to third-quarter GDP growth. Moreover, some of the hit from higher energy costs is probably also temporary, as crude prices are down on net over the past three months. But the slowdown of recent months goes well beyond what can be explained with these temporary effects. … final demand growth has slowed to a pace that is typically only seen in recessions. .. Moreover, if the economy returns to recession—not our forecast, but clearly a possibility given the recent numbers …

Alarms bells must be ringing all over Obamaland today. Unemployment on Election Day about where it is right now? Sputtering — if not stalling — economic growth? To many Americans that would sound like the car is back in the ditch — if it was ever out.

Politico quotes Rep. Eric Cantor (R- VA) on the presidential temper tantrum that concluded the latest round of budget negotiations between the White House and Republicans.

Cantor said the two sides were too far apart to get a deal that could pass the House by the Treasury Department’s Aug. 2 deadline — and that he would consider moving a short-term debt-limit increase alongside smaller spending cuts — Obama began to lecture him.

“Eric, don’t call my bluff,” the president said, warning Cantor that he would take his case “to the American people.” He told Cantor that no other president — not Ronald Reagan, the president said — would sit through such negotiations.

Democratic sources dispute Cantor’s version of Obama’s walk out, but all sides agree that the two had a blow up. The sources described Obama as “impassioned” but said he didn’t exactly storm out of the room.

———————————————

Reuters adds a hilarious quotation from Mr. Obama.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Republicans at the conclusion of a stormy budget meeting on Wednesday that he would not yield further even if it puts his presidency at risk, a Republican aide said.

“I have reached the point where I say enough,” Obama said, according to the aide. “Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.”

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Bringing to mind a skit broadcast a few months back by Jay Leno:

Stephen Marche, in Esquire, delivers the kind of tribute to Obama that carries a double-edge.

[E]ven if you disagree with him, even if you hate him, even if you are his enemy, at this point you must admire him. The turning point came that glorious week in the spring when, in the space of a few days, he released his long-form birth certificate, humiliated Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and assassinated Osama bin Laden. The effortlessness of that political triptych — three linked masterpieces demonstrating his total command over intellectual argument, low comedy, and the spectacle of political violence — was so overwhelmingly impressive that it made political geniuses of the recent past like Reagan and Clinton seem ham-fisted. …

Reagan was able to call upon the classic American mythology of frontiersmen and astronauts and movie stars; Obama has accessed a much wider narrative matrix: He’s mixed and matched Jay-Z with geek with Hawaiian with Kansan with product of Middle America with product of a broken home with local Chicago churchgoer with internationally renowned memoirist with assassin. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy. Christopher Booker’s 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots, a wide-ranging study from the Epic of Gilgamesh on and a surprisingly convincing explanation for why we crave narrative, reduced all stories to a few plots, each with its own kind of hero. Amazingly, Barack Obama fulfills the role of hero in each of these ancient story forms.

While Obama’s story is ancient, it is also utterly contemporary, perfectly of the moment. His gift — and it is a gift that makes him emblematic — is that he inhabits all these roles without being limited by them. He has managed, miraculously, to remain something of an outsider while being the president of the United States of America, the most inside man in the world. He’s African-American, but he’s not African-American. He’s from Chicago, but he’s from Hawaii. One month he’s bailing out the banks, the next he’s keeping Gitmo open. He pushes health-care reform through with an unimpeachable heave of will then extends the tax cuts. He walks smiling through the newly opened White House garden on his way to announce renewed efforts at oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, his “balanced” approach to the economy has led to a slower recovery than other industrialized nations and the war in Libya has been half-assed at best, which is exactly what war cannot be. For two years, he seemed disingenuous and defensive, pushed into roles that his predecessors had scripted, alternately playing savior then monster. But no more. We can finally see who he is, we can finally understand the reality: In 2011, it is possible to be a levelheaded, warmhearted, cold-blooded killer who can crack a joke and write a book for his daughters. It is possible to be many things at once. And even more miraculous, it is possible for that man to be the president of the United States. Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a “world-historical soul,” an embodiment of the spirit of the times.

Christopher Chantrill explains why the democrats are completely screwed.

[T]he two political parties are diametrically opposed on recession-fighting policy. The Republican recipe to “boost growth” is to lower tax rates and regulation, and the Democratic recipe is to “invest” in stimulus spending. For Republicans, “structural economic policy changes” means reform Social Security and Medicare; for Democrats it means raise taxes.

There is no “agreement.” There is only a game of chicken to see who blinks first before August 2.

But we are conservatives. We do not just want to “win;” we want to do the right thing. How do we get out of the recession?

The best way to understand a recession is this: It is a period of adjustment during which the malinvestments of the previous boom are liquidated. Usually, in our era, booms are ignited by cheap money injected into the credit system by government. Cheap money seduces people into borrowing too much.

In the 2000s boom the malinvestments were the homes that millions of people bought with cheap credit, courtesy of Fannie, Freddie and CRA. Homebuilders expanded and sucked a ton of workers and capital goods into homebuilding. Everything looked good until interests rates rose and home prices started to decline.

You know what happened next. “Malinvestment” became nightmare investment, as the greedy bankers foreclosed on millions of homes, and home prices cratered.

But at some point the foreclosures will ease up, bottom-feeders will buy up the flood of houses, and home construction will resume.

The logic of Democratic “stimulus” is that if government shovels out enough money it will tide the economy over the crater. Home prices will recover, businesses will revive, and growth will resume. But what if home prices don’t recover before the stimulus runs out?

Back in 2009, the Obama administration made a judgment, implicit or explicit, that the housing crisis would be over in a couple of years, and that cheap money (QE1 and QE2) and a trillion dollar stimulus program would tide the economy over till then. But they were wrong. The housing market still hasn’t bottomed out, and the economy hasn’t snapped back, as this chart demonstrates.

The Obama mistake was bad enough but the Obamis made a second error. Assuming that the economy would revive in accordance with Baldrick’s cunning plan, they went ahead with their plans for expanding government spending and regulation, spraying money at their deserving supporters. They thought that the economy would soon be strong enough to increase the weight of government. With ObamaCare they increased the weight of government in health care. With regulation, spending, and subsidies pushing green energy they increased the weight of government in energy production.

That’s where the slick assumptions in Cohn’s “increase short-term deficits in ways that boost growth” kicks in. Suppose your “short-term deficit” doesn’t boost growth? Suppose it is just another wasteful government program that increases the weight of government, and postpones the day when happy days are here again?

That’s where the Obamis are sitting right now. They have shot their bolt with cheap money and stimulus spending and cranked up the National Debt by 40 percent. But here we are in Summer 2011 and there is still no light at the end of the tunnel.

To fix things the Obamis would have to adopt the Republican agenda and reduce the weight of government. They would have to repeal ObamaCare, reverse their green energy boondoggle, lower tax rates, and cut wasteful government spending.

You can see the problem. For the last 40 years, ever since the “unexpected” success of Reaganomics, liberals have been telling themselves and everyone else that supply-side economics is a mirage. Now they have to admit that everything they believe is wrong.

For the second time in some of our lifetimes, the American voting public has been treated to a full-scale, practical test of left-wing, Keynesian economics in operation. We saw all this before in the latter half of the 1970s.

Barack Obama’s great leap forward to the shiny new American European-style welfare state has turned a political version of Bernard Law Montgomery’s WWII Operation Market Garden, Obamacare being the “Bridge Too Far.” But the economics of the world of reality is actually a less forgiving, and much more formidable adversary, than the Germany Army in the Fall of 1944. The Allies went on to win WWII. Obama will be going to join Jimmy Carter in the ashbin of history and will soon be Carter’s rival for the title of worst president anyone can remember.