Barone on the 'Audacity of Weakness'
Michael Barone writing in the Examiner nails it:
A third Obama weakness is his propensity to charge his political opponents with playing politics when he is doing exactly that himself. In previewing this latest jobs-and-the-economy speech, Carney said that Obama will make the case "that politics is broken, and that politics is getting in the way of the very necessary things we need to do."
This from the president who has brushed aside one bipartisan initiative after another, from the health care initiative of Sens. Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett to the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.
Instead he has taken a purely partisan course on one issue after another -- and heaped blame on Republicans. He invited House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan to his speech at George Washington University and then lambasted him harshly.
Obama has been so consistently blaming Republicans in recent months for not approving the free-trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama that it came as an utter surprise to his assistant press secretary Josh Eager that he hasn't yet sent them to Congress.
The cynicism it takes to declare oneself a non-partisan, or "the only adult in the room" and then launch partisan attack after partisan attack is breathtaking. And yet, his water carriers in the media claim that the reason his administration is in trouble is because he caves in to Republicans too much - that he is too "non-partisan."
He is a "moderate" - who radically transformed the health care industry in America. He is reasonable - and he also overloaded the financial industry with regulations and saddled consumers with another agency designed to prevent us from making bad investments. He is brilliant - except every move he has made on the economy has proved how truly ignorant he is of even basic economic theory.
He is nothing of the sort. He is a far left partisan liberal who has helped radicalize our politics and whose management of the economy is breaking us.
And the American people are just waking up to that fact.