Obama - Demonizing everyone else RATHER than trying to solve the problem!!!

It's typical Obama strategy....take NO responsibility and blame EVERYONE ELSE....in this case it's Standard and Poors' fault because they used poor reasoning AND it's the Tea Party's fault...Nothing could be farther from the truth...IF the tea party had it's way we'd have Cap, Cut and Balance in place today and not have a downgrade...or we'd have Paul Ryan's budget approved and not have a downgrade...it was Obama that initially demanded a clean debt limit vote...and Demmocrats in general have been totally opposed to cutting any spending...Again Obama and the Administration along with the Demmocrats think the American People are STUPID!

Where was this President yesterday when he should have be trying to calm the markets before the market opened today....BUT no he was on a weekend vacation in Camp David...He was THE ONE that created this August 2nd crisis and now he has to take credit for the results....It needs to cost him the election in 2012!!!

White House: Downgrade Doesn’t Matter, Unless It’s The Tea Party’s Fault

By Chris Stirewalt Published August 08, 2011

Team Obama Downplays Downgrade, But Blames Tea Party Too

“Look at the history of this – the fact of the matter is that this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade. The Tea Party brought us to the brink of a default.”

-- David Axelrod, top political consultant to President Obama, in an appearance on “Face the Nation.”

The decision by Standard and Poor’s to downgrade the rating of U.S. government debt is:

A) A meritless attack by a biased agency that can’t even do math.

B) The deserved result of the fiscal recklessness of a conservative cabal inside the Republican Party

C) Both A and B

For the Obama White House, the answer has been an emphatic, and sometimes confusing, C.

The administration and the president’s re-election campaign have taken a two-pronged counterattack on the credit-rating rip.

At first, the administration believed that they had turned back the downgrade by convincing the ratings house that its numbers crunchers had overestimated U.S. indebtedness by $2 trillion.

But S&P’s pulled the trigger anyway. Their essential point: When the world’s largest economy and only superpower is on track by 2020 to spend as much on debt interest as it does on defense, a political system that doesn’t allow reform must be very badly broken.

The debt ceiling deal reached last week shaves almost $1 trillion off of increases to projected spending over the next decade, but that still means that spending is projected to go up about $7 trillion over that timeframe.

S&P’s, though, should at least be happy that their rating prompted only claims of incompetence and bias by the Obama administration. When the agency and Moody’s torched Italy’s debt, listing it as quasi-junk last month, the Italian government staged a raid on the raters’ offices in Rome and is preparing a criminal prosecution.

And S&P’s pretty well had to say something about the U.S. Having issued platinum ratings for garbage-mortgage-backed securities in the last decade, the agency has taken a much tougher line of late. Admitting that a nation with a debt as large as its economy and is on track to borrow, on average, $1 trillion a year for the next decade has a debt problem was sort of the least it could do.

Moody’s tried to be more polite by retaining the AAA rating for U.S. debt but issuing a very dire forecast with a warning that unless politicians reach a politically impossible deal on debt soon, it too will downgrade the debt.

For those who choose to lend the U.S. money, like China and Japan (Social Security and Medicare contributors have no choice) this is no surprise. China downgraded U.S. debt sometime ago and S&P’s is hardly the first to discover that the American political system is kind of at a crossroads these days.

Interest rates have not gone through the roof, though, because we still look good compared to the rest of the planet. We’re AA+ in a junk-bond world.

The downgrade is really of psychological significance. It is a symbolic thing for Uncle Sam to get his first-ever downgrade. Coming as Europe is slipping under waves of red ink and the global economy sputters to a halt, the debt downgrade is just another reminder of how precarious the situation for the U.S. has become.

For President Obama, it has the danger of becoming his own version of Jimmy Carter’s Iranian hostage crisis.

He’s not chiefly to blame for the downgrade (it’s really the manifestation a 50-year-old problem), but Obama is vulnerable to Republican accusations of overspending and fiscal imprudence for the policies of his first two years. Carter wasn’t strictly to blame for the hostage takings either, but he was vulnerable to Republican charges that his foreign policy broadcast weakness and invited challenges abroad.

Neither debacle -- neither a rating met with a “Duh!” by U.S. lenders nor the Iranians holding 52 embassy workers for 444 days -- is important itself, but both have symbolic resonance because of their timing. Right now, investors and capitalists both small and large, already afraid of a slowdown and scads of uncertainty, have one more reason to hoard their cash and wait for brighter days. This is how bear markets and recessions work: bad omens beget bad news, which beget more bad news.

With America facing a backslide into recession and with no end in sight to a jobs drought, Obama is not interested in being known as “President Downgrade.” The administration, therefore, is making a tricky argument: The downgrade is meaningless, but if it isn’t, it’s not their fault. It’s the Tea Party.

S&P’s point is that the debt deal was a fleabite compared to the larger problem, not that there was a danger the U.S. would soon default. Their point is that if it takes a crisis and the threat of a government shutdown to get some trims to the projected increase in spending, Washington isn’t ready to tackle the problem – too much drama for too little reform.

But the administration wants to couple the downgrade with the debt ceiling, suggesting that the world fears Tea Party intransigence and federal failure. But there’s little doubt that had the Tea Party not steamed its way into the 2010 election, the deal would have had less spending control. The president wanted an unconditional debt increase, more stimulus spending and many establishment Republicans argued against fighting him too hard on the demand.

But, the administration will push on the notion that had Republicans been more receptive to compromise, a grand bargain would have been struck that would have satisfied creditors and credit raters. But there would have been no hope of a grand bargain had the pressure for a deal not existed in the first place.

With that narrative established, the administration is ready to fight its way through the pending super committee that will determine whether the debt ceiling goes up by $1.2 trillion paired with automatic, across-the-board cuts or $1.5 trillion in exchange for a bipartisan deal on future debt.

As Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., pointed out to Chris Wallace on “FOX News Sunday,” the super committee isn’t designed to solve the future crisis but sort out the aftermath of the last one.

Few in Washington are optimistic about the committee and with the administration facing intense criticism from the left for being too accommodating to Republican “terrorists,” it looks unlikely that the president will be in much of a conciliatory mood when the time comes to deal on debt, again, after Thanksgiving or when the current law funding the government expires on Sept. 30.

Given his currently dire political situation – disdained by independents and facing increasing contempt from his base – Obama can be expected to head into the coming conflicts blazing with blame and indignation.