Hope:

“And one of the things that I’m trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame. . . .  the key thing is for everybody just to stay focused on doing the job instead of trying to figure out who you can pass blame on to.”  –Barack Obama, March 2009.

Change:

“As Failures Grow, Obama Blames Others.” (Via Ed Driscoll, via Glenn Reynolds.)  And as I noted last night, “Mr. Obama blames policies inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt.“

“The latest posting by the Treasury Department” showing the national debt has increasing “by $4 trillion on President Obama’s watch” means that in the 2 years and 7 months since the Democrat took office, the nation has accumulated 82% of the debt it accumulated in 8 years under George W. Bush.

And someone thought we had been “living beyond our means” in the Bush era! ”

The debt,” reports Mark Knoller at CBS News, stood at “$10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion“:

It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.

The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.

Mr. Obama blames policies inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt. He singles out:

• “two wars we didn’t pay for”
• “a prescription drug program for seniors…we didn’t pay for.”
• “tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for.”

Um, Mr. Obama, we elected you to fix the problems you repeatedly refer to as “inherited.”  You don’t fix them by blaming your predecessor, but by offering solutions.

Oh, and since we’re talking about things we didn’t pay for, what about that $800 billion dollar “stimulus” that Congress passed when Democrats were in charge?

H/t Gateway Pundit.

Do the editors of Yahoo! think it helps President Obama to show him more than two-and-one-half years into his term whining about the mess he “inherited”:

He sounds not like a leader who has successfully pushed his policies through the legislature, but a man who has just taken charge of a failing company:

President Barack Obama said on Monday he inherited many of the country’s problems with high debt and deficits when he entered the White House, sounding a theme likely to dominate his 2012 re-election campaign.

Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser, where families paid $15,000 to get a picture with him, Obama defended his economic record and noted that problems in Europe were affecting the United States.

“We do have a serious problem in terms of debt and deficit, and much of it I inherited,” Obama said.

At some point, he needs to take responsibility for the failure of his policies to achieved their desired effect and that he knew he’d be inheriting when he applied for the job?

And now instead of rolling up his sleeves to fix the problems, he’s looking forward to campaigning against Republicans, “What we’re going to have is 16 months in which we debate this vision for America, and it’s going to be as fundamental a debate as 2008″.

Sixteen months of debate?

What bout twelve months of hard work?  Putting forward plans and policies to show he knows what he’s doing and merits another four years in the White House.

I mean, he doesn’t have a Democratic primary opponent and the actual campaign won’t ramp up until next summer’s conventions.  Seems he’d rather campaign for the presidency than do his job.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  ILoveCapitalism offers, “The President’s job is to fix inherited messes; otherwise, why have him?” Indeed.

UPDATE:  Turns out Obama’s current whining it at odds with his own rhetoric.  Jim Geraghty alerts us to an RNC ad which reminds us what the president said just six months after taking office:

The RNC can be cruel sometimes, reminding us all that back in July 2009, Obama declared, “My administration has a job to do as well. That job is to get this economy back on its feet. That’s my job, and it’s a job I gladly accept. (more…)

Seems the Democratic talking point of the weekend is “Tea Party Downgrade,” with John Kerry, David Axelrod and Howard Dean all using the expression to blame the downgrade in the nation’s credit rating.  Yahoo! even included Democrats’ talking point in its news headline yesterday:

John McCain, Ed Morrissey notes, begged to differ:

We could have reached an agreement a lot earlier, but the members of the House of Representatives had a mandate last November, and it was jobs and the economy and it was spending. And for them to then agree to tax increases and spending increases was obviously a repudiation of the mandate they felt they had from last November

Emphasis added.  ”McCain,” Morrissey added “gets this one right”:

Voters sent a clear message in last year’s midterms, and it wasn’t “spend more and increase taxes.”  Democrats refused to listen in 2009 when voters revolted over the addition of another massive entitlement program; voters spent all of 2010 revolting over Obamanomics; and they punished Democrats in November for not listening to them.  Democrats still aren’t listening, and the way they are reacting now, 2012 may make 2010 look like a good year for the Democratic Party.

Well, that all depends on the success of the Democrats’ slash and burn strategy.  At least, this talking points helps Republicans prepare for 2012 as the Democrats have given us yet another foretaste of Obama’s 2012 campaign theme:  attack Republicans!  Blame the Tea Party!

Andrew Malcolm reflects on Obama’s leadership style as manifested in recent negotiations with congressional Republicans:

Obama will, no doubt, have more to say about the deal today. See if he throws in more sour grapes as he did after the GOP won its Bush tax cut extensions in last December’s talks. Back then, Obama, who promised to bring both sides together if elected in 2008, called his fellow deal-makers “hostage-takers.”

. . . .

Obama stepped into the stalled talks in recent weeks. He never offered his own new debt reduction plan, but used several public statements and closed White House meetings to show executive leadership and criticize other plans.

He used his poll-tested “balanced approach” demand numerous times (meaning more taxes as well as spending cuts) and sent aides like David Plouffe out to repeat how Republicans were demanding “my way or the highway.”

Via Instapundit.  Read the whole thing

Wasn’t Obama the guy who was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

It seems an article blaming the deficit on George W. Bush (of which I took note late Tuesday night (PST)) originated in a chart the White House developed.

Economics writers Megan McArdle was not as “enamored” with the chart as was one of her Atlantic colleagues:

. . . considering that this graph attributes decisions made by Obama and an all-Democratic Congress–like doubling down in Afghanistan–to Bush, while taking responsibility for basically nothing except the stimulus.  When Obama extends the Bush tax cuts for the rich under pressure from Congressional Republicans, that disappears from his side of the ledger, because after all, he didn’t want to do it.  When Bush enacts Medicare Part D under pressure from Congressional Democrats, the full cost is charged against his presidency.  The list of such silliness goes on.  Our president seems set to coin another presidential motto: “The duck starts here.”

Read the whole thing.  (Via Instapundit.)  Interesting that the White House would divert federal resources (you know those in short supply) to putting together a graphic attempting to exonerate the incumbent for the current debt crisis while passing the blame onto his predecessor.

Observing how the deficit skyrocketed from 1.6% (as a percentage of GDP) under Bush to 10% under Obama, this sage blogress asks, “What changed about Bush policies that made them so much more expensive once Barack Obama took office?”

McArdle adds that she’s not “interested in the Bush-v-Obama, red-v-blue allocation of blame, but the [White House] graph . . . was made by someone who seems very interested indeed in allocating as much blame as possible to Republicans–indeed, more interested in that than anything else.”

Wish this White House has heeded the advice of the guy who said he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

Once again, instead of providing a plan, President Obama blames his predecessor for his problems:

Does President Obama even read what is put in the teleprompter before he delivers it? On Monday night, Obama claimed that “because neither party is blameless for the decisions that led to this problem, both parties have a responsibility to solve it.” But just three paragraphs earlier, Obama put the blame for our $14.3 trillion debt squarely on President George W. Bush, claiming that “trillions of dollars in new tax cuts,” “two wars” and “an expensive prescription drug program” caused government surpluses to turn into annual deficits. This despite the fact that in only three years Obama’s spending has added $3.7 trillion to the national debt.

Monday night was not the only time Obama has schizophrenically shifted between demagogic finger pointing and patronizing lecturing. In fact, the speech provided an illustration of the central reason he has failed to provide the kind of presidential leadership that is crucial to solving the debt-limit crisis. “I won’t bore you with the details,” Obama said of his secret budget plan. But the biggest problem with Obama’s approach so far is that he has never bothered with any details. The White House has been negotiating with congressional leaders for months, yet Obama has never committed any of his offers to paper. The result has been a steady flood of leaks, counterleaks, speeches and news conferences about what was, or was not, in the latest rejected offer. This environment, created entirely by Obama, created only mistrust and ill will between the parties.

Read the whole thing.

Well, if we can really lay the blame at the feet of George W. Bush, we should remember that man has long since retired to Texas (over two-and-one-half years ago).

Running against said Mr. Bush and touting himself as an improvement on the Texan,  Mr. B. Obama was elected to clean up his messes.  Instead of complaining, he should start put forward his plan to fix the problems W. supposed created.  Alas, that most plans he has put forward only make the problem worse, you know, like further adding to our national debt.

More than two-and-one-half years after George W. Bush left the White House, his successor began his speech on the debt crisis blaming him for the mess we’re in, as if no one’s been minding the store since said successor took office.

It’s not just Barack Obama.  Now, we’ve got a staff writer at Salon using a bizarre manner of budget calculation, concluded apparently by the left-wing think tank, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (founded by a Carter Administration official) to conclude that, well, the deficit is all Bush’s fault.

Well, you can’t keep blaming Bush when his successor’s had more than two years to correct his mistakes. If the Bush tax cuts were so bad, why then didn’t Obama repeal them when he had a Democratic Congress?  Or just let them lapse.

It does seem that many liberals, instead of recognizing that Obama’s policies are not working, would rather blame Bush, a tactic that served them so well in 2006 and 2008 — and may have brought them some emotional satisfaction before that.  And maybe still does.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  ILoveCapitalism offers a superb succinct summary:

The deficit problem is a spending problem. Bush did unwisely increase non-defense spending by some hundreds of billions (including a new entitlement program). But the spending/deficit problem really took off in FY2008, the first budget in some years to be authored by a Democratic Congress:http://blog.heritage.org/2010/02/05/past-deficits-vs-obamas-deficits-in-pictures/

Emphasis added. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Is the White House and not a left-wing think tank the source of this flimflammery? (The chart Megan McArdle includes in this post (via Instapundit) seems remarkably similar to the one linked above.)

I watched the speech while doing cardio at the gym, reading the speech via closed captioning.  I thus focused more on his physical appearance than his tone of voice.  The president did not look very happy, more like a husband lecturing his wife for requiring him to attend a family function on the weekend he was supposed to go golfing with his college buddies*.  He didn’t want to do what he was doing.

He never seemed to smile, seemed angry at times.  He wasn’t talking to us; like that aggrieved spouse, he was lecturing to us.

And he started off by playing the card that served him so well in the 2008 presidential campaign, blaming George W. Bush for creating the problem.  Not until the end, did he offer the upside of his approach.  He spent the better part of his address, focusing on (his perception of) the downside of the Republican approach, those angry Tea Party extremists, keeping my pal Boehner, you know that otherwise sensible Republican, from compromising.

He engaged in class warfare, wondering why we don’t ask the rich to pay their fair share. (What about having federal workers share in the sacrifice, considering their salaries are considerably higher than those of their counterparts in the private sector?)

He tried to make himself seem like the moderate against these extreme advocates for the wealthy.  He was, he claimed, only acting as Ronald Reagan had, wanting the federal government to pay its bills on time.  Only he didn’t mention how he had jacked up federal spending in his first two years in office while that great man had done everything possible to hold the line on domestic spending — and did a pretty darn good job considering he faced off against a Democratic Speaker. (more…)

Harry S Truman would gasp if he read the transcript of his fellow Democrat’s remarks last night.  This president’s press briefing was vintage Obama, pass the buck and blame Republicans.

In response to the first question, er, set of questions, “What is your answer about the path forward? What path do you prefer, given what’s just happened? And also, sir, quickly, what does this say about your relationship with Speaker Boehner?”, he focused on that relationship.

In 627 words, he failed to say just what his plan was, but he did devote considerable time to tossing barbs at the Republicans Speaker and his fellow partisans; “my expectation,” he said in his first hundred words, “was that Speaker Boehner was going to be willing to go to his caucus and ask them to do the tough thing but the right thing. I think it has proven difficult for Speaker Boehner to do that. I’ve been left at the altar now a couple of times.”

Seems doing the “tough thing” is doing what Obama wants.

The Democrat even wondered if the Republicans could “say yes to anything”.  Well, the House did say “yes” to Cut, Cap and Balance.

627 words, a lot of partisan record for the man once billed a post-partisan and no solutions.   He failed to specify his plan.  Well, maybe he thought “path” meant the way forward in negotiations.  (Would be interesting this weekend if any reporter asks a Democrat point-blank, “What’s your plan?”)

When the Democrats were in power from 2009-2010, they ran up the deficit, increasing spending at the most rapid pace since World War II.  They didn’t provide a means to pay for their profligacy.  And that profligacy is one reason Republicans won back the House last fall.

Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Democrats ran up the debt and now they expect Republicans to pick up the tab, hiking the debt ceiling to cover their messes.  If this vote is so important to the president, why didn’t he push it through Congress when his party enjoyed majorities in both Houses?

Wondering about the absence of media scrutiny on why “our esteemed lions of the Fourth Estate toiling in the White House Press Corps” have failed to ask the president about his opposition to a “constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget”, Mark Tapscott finds this to be. . .

. . . an illustration of why so many journalists covering the White House, Congress and national politics so frequently end up functioning like “Homers.” No, I’m not referring to the ancient author, but rather the derisive term for sports reporters who never write anything critical of the home professional teams.

Whether they intend to or not, too many journalists are little more than Homers for the Big Government team.

Via Instapundit.  But, this, as we’ve noted is not the only question they’re not asking. Yesterday in WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Paul A. Gigot wrote about one Democrat whose obstructionist tactics have generated little interest in the mainstream media:

His [Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)] role has been obvious for some time, but a revealing and generally laudatory article by Meredith Shiner in Roll Call this week lays out the Schumer strategy of assailing House Republicans as radical, in particular demonizing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in personal terms, and opposing any Democratic concessions on entitlements. Mr. Schumer also led the internal fight against releasing a Senate budget, though Democrats control that body and are supposed to pass a budget resolution under the 1974 budget law.

This is cynicism squared, but Mr. Schumer has been getting away with it because the press pack has fixated on the political narrative of House Republicans vs. President Obama. This gives Senate Democrats up for re-election next year a free pass to hide under Mr. Schumer’s brand of attack politics while pretending to favor spending cuts and debt reduction and to oppose tax increases. (more…)

The National Republican Senatorial Committee takes the president to task for blaming Republicans for the impasse in negotiations to raise the debt limit:

(Via Jim Geraghty.)

That reminds me, um, where’s the president’s revised budget given his repudiation of the initial plan he offered? And where’s his plan to reform Medicare to prevent its coming insolvency, given the warning of the popular program’s trustees?

On March 19, 2009, after spending fewer than two full months in the White House, President Obama told Jay Leno that “one of the things” he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“  Well after more than two years as the nation’s chief executive, Barack Obama has showed us that he delights in blaming others for the difficulties his job entails.

Just today at his press conference, he blamed the failure to increase the federal debt limit on Congress.  Observing that the one-time self-professed post-partisan politician “set a combative tone that carried through the rest of the hour and seven minute session“, the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll concluded that

This was not the press conference of a president looking to provide leadership for a debt limit deal before Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s supposed August 2nd deadline. This was a president laying the groundwork to blame congressional Republicans for any negative fallout after Geithner decides to stop sending Social Security checks to seniors.

Carroll reminds us that the president “began his remarks by listing listed a number of bills that could help lower the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate but were still “pending before Congress right now.” If those bills were so important to creating jobs, why then didn’t the president push them through when his party held comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress?

And why didn’t he take congressional Democrats to task last year for failing to pass them? And since his party still controls one federal legislative chamber, why then hasn’t that body, the Senate, led by example and voted on those bills?

It seems this president has a political strategy, but not a governing one:  make the Republicans appear obstructionist so he can win a second term, but to what end?  So, he can keep power and keep on demagoguing?

Budget deficit moves closer to $1 trillion mark:

The federal budget deficit is on pace to break the $1 trillion mark for a third straight year. Record deficits are putting pressure on Congress and the Obama administration to come up with a plan to rein in government spending.

Already, the deficit through the first eight months of this budget year is $927.4 billion, according to the latest report from the Treasury Department released Friday.

Three years ago that would have ranked as the highest ever for a full year. Instead, this year’s deficit will likely exceed last year’s $1.29 trillion imbalance and nearly match the $1.41 trillion record reached in 2009. The budget year ends on Sept. 30.

In the article is AP’s Economics Writer, Martin Crutsinger, frequently references the growth of the budget deficit in early years of the Bush Administration, without addressing the increased security costs in the aftermath of 9/11.

He also doesn’t mention that inthe three years preceding the swearing-in of a Democratic Congress in 2007, deficits were declining. Despite Mr. Crutsinger’s attempt to blame Bush for these deficits, Democrats controlled Congress for each of the three fiscal years the federal government ran trillion-dollar deficits, including the current one.  And for the last two, there has been a Democrat in the White House with the power to veto their spending bills.

A power he failed to exercise.

UPDATE:  In case, you don’t believe me, take a gander at this chart:

“Don’t expect,” blogging law professor William A. Jacobson writes, “much to be made of [Senator Ben] Nelson’s comments ["splitting with his party over the [Obamacare] mandate”], because only heretical comments by Republicans are newsworthy and a big deal.”

It does seem our friends in the MSM make much of divisions in the GOP, but downplay similar splits in the Democratic Party as just civil family misunderstandings that happen from time to time in a big, diverse happy movement.  And while the Democrats are busy demagoguing Republican plans to reform Medicare as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed in his budget, in the federal legislative chamber where the Democrats still have a majority, members of the president’s party, in Andrew Stiles words . . .

. . . have now gone 750 days without passing a budget in the Senate, and Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), the budget-committee chairman, has remained steadfastly aloof regarding his plans to move forward. Conrad’s hesitance should become even more glaringly obvious now that his go-to excuse — the ongoing nature of the so-called Gang of Six negotiations — has been rendered inoperative following Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R., Okla.) decision to “take a break” from the talks.

Conrad served on President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission and has spoken out frequently on the need for urgent action to address the debt problem. But when Conrad presented his initial budget proposal at a Democratic caucus meeting several weeks ago, he was all but chased out of the room by party leaders. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) warned members not to “draw lines” by signing on to any budget plan.

With the deficit now above one trillion dollars and the president expressing a commitment to confront out debt problem, the top Senate Democrat is telling members of his caucus to avoid committing to any budget plan.  That’s rich.  They’d rather attack the Republican plan than come up with one of their own.

You’d think this might be a story which would merit more attention in the mainstream media.

H/t Heritage Foundation via Bruce.

In his speech last week on the budget, President Obama blamed his predecessor for creating the massive deficits which plague us today:

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed.  We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending.  Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this:  In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened.  And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place.  When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion.

What he didn’t mention is that when he took office, his party had had majorities in both houses of Congress for the preceding two years, with him serving in the upper chamber.  Under Democratic leadership, the annual increase in federal spending jumped considerably. The federal deficit which had been declining for three straight years when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches, skyrocketed.

Nor did the president mention that while “the debt during Bush’s eight years in office increased from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion, or $4.9 trillion over eight years“, it has increased at an even greater rate since the Democrat replaced the much maligned Republican in the White House:

. . . in the less than three years Obama has been in office, the debt has increased from $10.6 trillion to $14.2 trillion, a $3.6 trillion increase in about 27 months.  In other words, Obama is increasing the debt by $1.6 trillion per year, three times as fast as Bush.

This is not to excuse Bush and the 108th and 109th Republican Congresses.  After all, as we said repeatedly on this blog at that time, they didn’t do enough to rein in out-of-control federal spending, but to remind you that while “Bush’s record on increasing the national debt is bad . . . Obama’s is worse.“

In a post on Pajamas Media’s main page in October 2008, Tom Blumer provided a chart which helps us understand why we’re in the fiscal situation we are today:

Federal outlays already increasing at a rapid pace with Republican Congresses increased at an even more rapid pace when Nancy Pelosi took over as House Speaker and Harry Reid, thanks to a new crop of Democratic Senators, elected with the help of then-chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Charles Schumer, became Senate majority leader.

Now that very same Mr. Schumer is whining that conservatives are to blame for an imminent government shutdown:

“What we have here is a flea, wagging a tail, wagging a dog,” said Schumer, chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

“The flea are the minority of House Republicans who are hard right, the tail is the House Republican caucus, and the dog is the government,” Schumer explained. “That flea is influencing what the dog does … and it is sad.”

Schumer for more than a week has been arguing that Tea Party conservatives will be to blame if there is a shutdown.

(Via Ann Althouse.)  Sorry, Charlie, the reason Tea Party conservatives have such clout is because their outrage at the increasing size of the federal government has resonated with the American people, leading to the election of Republican legislators (and at least one Senate Democrat) who want to hold the line on spending.

If Americans had the facts, they won’t blame House Speaker John Boehner, but instead hold Democrats to account for the shutdown.  Nick Gillespie reminds us why Congress is still voting on their FY2011 budget — six full months after that fiscal year began:  Democrats “utterly failed to pass a fricking budget last year even though they controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.”  (Via Instapundit.) (more…)

A number of pundits on the left and in the center have showered praise on Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg saying the Wisconsin Republican “has made a serious attempt to grapple with the long-term fiscal issue the country faces. He has a largely coherent, workable set of answers. If you don’t like them, now you need to come up with something better.”

Others have resorted to diatribe, with the Washington Post‘s Harold Meyerson calling the plan “a prescription for diminishing prosperity and security, a road map, in fact, for national decline“:

Ryan’s budget would also reduce projected spending on discretionary domestic programs — education, transportation, food safety and the like — to well below levels of inflation. That not only ensures that high-speed rail won’t be built but also means that potholes won’t be filled.

Does Mr. Meyerson realize that government has been growing well above the rate of inflation at least since Democrats took charge of Congress in January 2007, allowing budget deficits to soar?  And does he really believe his hyperbole about potholes?  If so, he should direct his ire at state and local governments, traditionally responsible for street repair.  And what is his plan for deficit reduction?

It seems national Democrats are following not the sober evaluation of Weisberg, but instead the hyperbolic outburst of Meyerson.  They think they can score political points by labeling Republicans as mean-spirited tightwads who want to give tax breaks to the rich and take food from the mouths of babes.  ”House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,” for example, “said the Republican budget” would “force seniors into starvation.”

Meanwhile, her Democrats still haven’t come up with a plan.  And yet, as Greg Sargent reports in the Post‘s Plum Line, they’re hoping “hoping to use the Ryan proposal against numerous” candidates.  Via David Freddoso who asks if Democrats can turn Paul Ryan into the next bogey-man? (more…)

On Tuesday, via the New York Times blog (but not, at least according to this google search, their print edition), we learn:

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process. . . .  Mr. Schumer told them to portray John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

Can you imagine how much media it would have gotten if Schumer’s Republican counterpart, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was caught on a similar call insisting that Republicans call Democratic proposals “extreme”?

Now, what makes all this interesting is that given candidate Barack Obama’s concession to conservative ideas in the presidential campaign and the bipartisan agreement President Obama entered into last falls to extend the tax rates established by his Republican predecessor, the only way Congress can reduce the deficit is by cutting federal spending.

The Republican House, attempting to finish the work left undone by the preceding Democratic Congress, passed a budget for the balance of the current fiscal year, cutting $61 billion in federal spending.  The Democratic Senate has yet to pass a budget.  So, instead of trying to reach a compromise with his partisan adversaries in the other chamber of Congress, Mr. Schumer, under marching orders from his caucus, is seeking to demonize Republicans who have started making tough decisions on spending. (more…)