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RedStatehttps://redstate.com/erick/2011/08/08/what-if-barack-obama-is-right/feed/Conservative News & Politicsen-usFri, 12 Jun 2026 08:51:31 -0400In All Seriousness, What If Barack Obama Is Right?<![CDATA[Seriously. All you people on left and right, suspend your disbelief for one minute. Seriously.What if Barack Obama was right and S&P just got it wrong.Here’s what I’m hearing and it gives credence to this theory.S&P, I’m told, began telling some of its clients about the downgrade on Friday morning. That’s why the market was so screwed up on Friday.By Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department told S&P it had made a $2 trillion math mistake.But S&P had already told its clients about the downgrade. So it couldn’t walk it back now without a major loss of confidence in its credibility. Could you imagine that conversation? “Hey . . . um . . . Joe. Yeah, Charlie here from S&P. So . . .um . . . we made a $2 trillion math mistake in our downgrade analysis. . . . What’s that? You just lost $500 million in the market because of it? Oh . . . um . . . sorry Joe. Better luck next time.”So it had to come up with a different reason.It’s reason? Acrimony in Washington — in other words, nothing to do with the U.S.A.’s ability to pay its debts or financial issues, just typical Washington politics. And it couched its statement in such a way that the tea party movement could say, “see, see, we told you Washington needed more cuts,” and the left could say, “see, see, we told you we needed tax increases.”Acrimony in Washington is nothing new. Despite a lot of rhetoric about compromise this past week, it is a feature, not a bug, of the American system of government. And major debt and growing deficits are nothing new. And they are bipartisan, pre-existing, long term, and long existing problems.In other words, nothing new.]]>Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:58:52 -0400<![CDATA[Erick Erickson]]>https://redstate.com/erick/2011/08/08/what-if-barack-obama-is-right-n39970