The debt deal and Obama’s 2012 problem

The story is that as Mark Twain and novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked Twain, "Do you think it will stop?" Twain answered, "It always has." The debt-ceiling impasse has, as things generally do, ended, and a post-mortem validates conservatives' portrayal of Barack Obama and their dismay about the dangers and incompetence of liberalism's legacy, the regulatory state.

For weeks, you could not fling a brick in Washington without hitting someone with a debt-reduction plan — unless you hit Obama, whose plan, which he intimated was terrifically brave, was never put on paper. In a prime-time spill of his usual applesauce about millionaires, billionaires and oil companies, he said, yet again, that justice demanded a "balanced" solution — one involving new revenue. His whistle into the wind came after Washington's most consequential Democrat, Harry Reid, proposed a revenue-free solution.

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Karen Tumulty 02 Aug, 2011

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Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=0dd4cb36e70d0adc26e53f8390926cf3
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