When the news began to leak in the late afternoon Friday, and the announcement came in the evening that the S&P had indeed downgraded American debt for the first time, the White House spin team tried pushing back, but ended up contradicting itself. Starting on Friday night, Geithner and others at the White House insisted that S&P made a $2 trillion error —ironic, considering that this administration has twice made $2-trillion errors in its economic projections in the last two years — and that the downgrade was entirely invalid. At the same time, Democrats such as Sen. John Kerry, former DNC chair Howard Dean, and Obama’s closest political adviser David Axelrod insisted that the S&P downgrade was valid, and was entirely the fault of the Tea Party that bullied Obama into a bad deal.
The only person left out of the debate after the S&P downgrade announcement was Obama himself. He spent all weekend incommunicado at Camp David, and initial reports of his schedule Monday showed only closed-door meetings — and two evening fundraisers for his re-election campaign. The White House changed course mid-morning and promised an Obama statement on the downgrade for 1 p.m. At that point, Obama had about two hours to write a speech after an entire weekend to consider the issue, and that stretched to almost three hours thanks to his 52-minute late arrival at the podium. There was plenty of time to offer new ideas, new approaches, and a specific plan designed to boost confidence in American economic leadership.
Instead, Obama offered nothing new in his speech. Every component of it might just have been copied from the series of media appearances Obama made in the weeks before the debt-ceiling deal. Obama even mentioned more spending as part of the way forward, talking about “repair[ing] our roads and bridges and airports,” the kind of “shovel-ready” projects that even Obama knows are myth rather than reality. …
The empty podium proved to be a powerful message about this presidency. Obama has run out of ideas and has now been reduced to recycling the same meaningless sound bites at an endless series of media appearances. The president signaled to the markets that America has no leadership at the moment — a message that corroborates the S&P analysis.
And this leadership-free message was understood immediately by the markets, which lost a years worth of gains in a day…thanks, Bummer-bama.
TEA PARTY COULD HAVE GIVE a super speech, and most interesting,
that AMERICANS VALUE ARE PRIORITY IN AMERICA,
the rest is but only dust and flakes