Obama complains about the Republicans/Congress and their dedication to getting the debt crisis resolved when the TRUTH is he's not involved, not around and just lying to the American Public...Below is the truth!
Obama Complains About his Workload
“They're in one week, they're out one week. And then they're saying, ‘Obama has got to step in. You need to be here.’ I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done.”
-- A visibly indignant President Obama talking to reporters about claims that he has shown insufficient leadership on his request to increase the federal government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit.
President Obama told reporters that he found it “amusing” when people say he needs to show more leadership on the fiscal impasse in Washington, but there was little mirth evident in the president on Wednesday.
Obama swiped and swatted at Republicans for intransigence, reprising his previous attack lines on fiscal confrontations, suggesting that Democrats were ready to make sacrifices but Republicans were radical and self-seeking. The president suggested that Republicans were just expressing opposition to tax increases to fire up their political base and get on “cable news.”
That stuff is pretty much expected in Obama’s Washington. The president often calls into question the motives of everyone but himself. Republicans, he claims, are fixated on 2012 while he is intent on governing.
Those Obamaian flourishes get bipartisan eye rolls inside the Beltway because they are so patently political themselves. Everybody in Washington is always thinking about the next election, especially the campaigner in chief.
The president is attending two fundraisers in Philadelphia tonight – the 36th and 37th fundraising events of his presidency. His wife, meanwhile, is hitting a trio of fundraising events while on an official trip to visit the families of Vermont National Guard members.
By comparison, President George W. Bush had held fewer than a half-dozen such events at this point in his first term.
As the president tries to amass another record-breaking campaign war chest, he has been pushing the envelope not just of the time he’s spending hustling cash but the lengths he’s gone to in order to do so.
Obama has come under criticism for using the White House to record a campaign video for a fundraising raffle for donors to win dinner with him and Vice President Biden. Fundraisers have also offered food tastings with the White House chef and access to other trappings of executive power as ways to lure big-dollar donors.
The Clinton scandals of selling access to the people’s house to high-dollar donors had previously squelched that kind of mercantilism, but the huge financial goals set by Team Obama are driving the administration into some riskier behavior.
Newly released White House visitors’ logs show a second Democratic National Committee event was held in the White House this year – even before the now controversial executive briefing given to Wall Street donors in March.
The Obama campaign has been trying to downplay fundraising expectations for the second quarter of the year, which ends today. Anything short of $60 million in combined fundraising for Obama’s campaign and the DNC would be a disappointment given the unprecedented lengths to which Obama has gone to raise money.
But, again, this is not a new thing. Obama has mostly been in campaign mode since taking office but frequently accuses his opponents of being politically motivated instead of being imbued with the national interest. As the election draws nearer, this line will grow increasingly strained, but it is old hat.
The new wrinkle on Wednesday was that Obama expanded the argument to actual hours on the job. He accused Congress of being neglectful of their work by taking vacations while he was busy dealing with killing Usama bin Laden and helping avoid the looming insolvency of the euro.
That was weird.
Obama played golf twice last weekend, is getting ready for a long summer vacation and has been on an increasingly active tour of 2012 swing states to give remarks about green energy, auto bailouts and stimulus spending. These are all normal things for presidents to do, but strange that Obama would cast himself as overworked and Congress as a bunch of goldbrickers.
Aside from sounding whiny, it also lays the president open to criticism for every golf outing, fundraiser, swing-state visit, family getaway and the like that he engages in. He played into the hands of his critics by framing the argument on their grounds.
It will be easy enough for Senators (except for the politically vulnerable ones who are missing out on parades and fundraisers) to stick around next week and wait for word of a deal. It will be hard for Obama to defend his schedule having now held it up as a metric by which one’s national service can be measured.
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