There are two passages that you need to consider from this Hill article about how the current administration continues to blame the previous administration for everything in creation, but particularly our current rotten economic situation – a year after the current administration promised to stop doing precisely that. Here is the first passage…

During a July 14, 2009, address in Warren, Mich., Obama said, “Now, my administration has a job to do, as well, and that job is to get this economy back on its feet. That’s my job. And it’s a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy.’ That’s fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not to stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.”

…and here is the second:

The White House did not comment for this article.

Of course the White House did not comment: what could anyone from it say? “Yeah, well, we just wanted to look like we were accepting responsibility. We don’t actually know what to do with it, now that we have it. Besides, screaming about Bush will at least keep our liberal House members in office. The ones that are in reliably Democratic seats, that is. OK, OK, reliably liberal Democratic seats.”

The problem with President Obama is not that he is not the super-genius that virtually everybody up to now has made him out to be. I suspect that he himself knows that people do this to him, and so he’s able to compensate for it. No, what his problem is is that the President assumes that even if he isn’t a super-genius he’s still essentially competent at governance. This is equally untrue, honestly. Upon being elected, President Obama had no experience in running anything - including his campaign, which was run for him – no actual experience in legislative maneuvering and consensus-building, and no experience in… anything except running for higher office, once he grew bored with the current one.

And the President has quite obviously not learned anything significant since he took office, either.  If he had, he would have understood the message that the Republican House caucus sent him when they Held The Line on various key votes.  To be a Republican Congressman these days means that you have withstood what was a quite brutal Darwinian selection process in 2006 and 2008: say what you like about the survivors, but respect their survival instincts when you do so.  The President didn’t, which is why he’s now on the bad side of public opinion on the stimulus, Obamacare, and fiscal policy generally.  What he should have done was cut a deal with the GOP, using his ability to bring along the so-called “Blue Dogs:” it would have meant betraying liberals, but then that’s what they’re there for.  Instead, Obama let liberals in Congress have their collective head and then browbeat the aforementioned so-called “Blue Dogs” into going along with the painfully bloated monstrosities of legislation that inevitably resulted. Net result: the public now knows precisely who to blame for the current economic situation, and it isn’t the Republican party that has spent the last two years waving their hands and yelling “NOOOOOOO!  DON’T!”

If you’re wondering how that was smart of the President, let me save you the trouble that a lot of netrooters have (futilely) gone through: it wasn’t.  And it very well may cost the Democrats the House of Representatives… and after only four years of looting the Treasury, too.  It probably won’t stop them from continuing to blame Bush for all their ills, though.  After all: what else do they have to get them out of bed in the morning, at this point?  It’s not like many of them are sports fans.

Moe Lane

PS: “Party of No” is only an epithet when the country is saying “Yes, we can.”  The country is… not.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.