Whiner in Chief
By LisaB on March 14, 2009 at 7:45 PM in Current Affairs
While the economic crisis churns all our futures into sediment and while Treasury is unbelievably understaffed, Obama continues to pass the buck.
The WaPo has a piece noting that Obama continues to play that early childhood favorite – “it wasn’t ME.”
Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems “inherited” from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The “deepening economic crisis” that the president described six days after taking office became “a big mess” in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.
“By any measure,” he said during a March 4 event calling for government-contracting reform, “my administration has inherited a fiscal disaster.”
Of course, this is classic politicking. Bush did the same. But the risks, one would think, are bigger for Obama.
Upon entering the White House in 2001, Bush pinned the lackluster economy on his predecessor, using the “Clinton recession” to successfully argue in favor of tax cuts that won some Democratic support. But for Obama, who built his candidacy on a promise to rise above Washington’s divisive partisan traditions — winning over many independent voters and moderate Republicans in the process — blaming his predecessor holds special risks.
————-
“What the administration is involved in now is the politics of attribution,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “Each week that goes by with falling job numbers and Republican criticism of the administration’s flaws means falling approval ratings. What’s the antidote? That the guilty party is George Bush.”
“The trick,” Jacobs said, “is how do you shift blame to George Bush and retain any credibility on the idea that you are looking past partisan warfare? This looks like a doubling down on a very partisan approach.”
————
Six days after taking office, Obama kicked off an event on jobs, energy reform and climate change with “a few words about the deepening economic crisis that we’ve inherited.”
———–
Just over a week later, Obama, arguing for his stimulus plan, said that “we’ve inherited a terrible mess,” and a few days after that, in the economically depressed city of Elkhart, Ind., he told the audience, “We’ve inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression.”During a prime-time news conference later that day, he used “inherited” twice in the same sentence to describe the deficit and “the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.”
This month, Obama has described inheriting “a fiscal disaster” and “a real mess,”. . .
Does anyone else find this whining disingenuous considering BO has taken several days off already, failed to fill many important posts in, uh, TREASURY (see Larry Johnson’s piece: Let’s Know More About Obama and Less about Bristol Palin) and talks about, gasp, responsibility?
To me this all adds up as a profoundly unserious approach to what is likely to be the defining issue of the BO presidency.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
by 
* (Included in the 
* 
.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
