Wow! Robert Samuelson has a piece in today's Washington Post that is extremely critical of Obama, calling him out for both (1) dissembling on his budget plan and (2) not being nearly as bipartisan as he promised.This piece, in combination with Jackson Diehl's from last week, signals to me that the honeymoon may be officially over (particularly since both appeared in the WP, which I consider even more Obama-friendly than the NYT).
An excerpt from Samuelson's argument:
Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he is doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme; the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He says the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.
With today's depressed economy, big deficits are unavoidable for some years. But let's assume that Obama wins reelection. By his last year, 2016, the economy presumably will have long recovered. What does his final budget look like? Well, it runs a $637 billion deficit, equal to 3.2 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), projects Obama's Office of Management and Budget. That would match Ronald Reagan's last deficit, 3.1 percent of GDP in 1988, so fiercely criticized by Democrats.
