As I said earlier in the week, if The One really wants to get into it on issue of deficits and debt, bring it on. Here's his latest bit of breathtaking historical revisionism, via Greg:
“I don’t know how they've been bamboozling folks into thinking that they are the responsible, fiscally-disciplined party. They run up these wild debts and then when we take over we have to clean it up.”
Ah yes, the Republicans have somehow "bamboozled folks" into thinking that Obama and the Democrats are the true purveyors of "wild debts." How ever might people get that impression? Perhaps the current, unprecedented spending spree has something to do with it. I realize that liberals have hungrily consumed a recent, comprehensively phony "analysis" positing that Obama has ushered in a new age of austerity, or whatever, but even marginally attached voters can understand how bogus that is. This president took the reins admist a turbulent time of economic collapse, resulting in multiple "temporary" spending measures. He has institutionalized these sharply increased "emergency" spending levels as the new normal, and has presided over four consecutive trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits. Prior to this presidency, the United States had never had a single $1,000,000,000,000 deficit. We've now had four in a row; every last one orchestrated by the guy who pledged to have sliced the deficit in half by now. In some ways, Obama's characterization of Republican spending as "wild debts" isn't entirely off base. Over President Bush's two terms, he piled more than $4 trillion onto national debt, and the GOP controlled Congress for several years of that span (although the worst years came at the end of his second term, when Congressional Democrats held the purse strings). Candidate Obama called Bush's record on debt "unpatriotic:"
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Candidate Obama has since added over $5 Trillion to the national debt as President Obama, in less than half the time -- and Democrats held Congress from 2007 to 2011. Who's going "wild" here, Mr. President? Fun reminder: Our spending is going to hit the debt ceiling again within the year, possibly before the election. I'll leave you with this fact-check from the Washington Post, which punctures White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's peevish rant about conservatives' supposed "BS" on Obama's spending record. Three Pinnochios.
UPDATE - In the same speech last night, Obama complained about negative campaigning. The hypocrisy. It hurts. Even Politico isn't impressed with Obama's campaign thus far, writing that he's "stumbled out of the gate."
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