OBAMA CALLS FOR .... NOTHING

In a speech to be delivered this week, President Obama will once again extend the hand of bi-partisanship to Republicans to join him in developing a comprehensive long-term plan to tackle the growing and undoubtedly unsustainable federal budget. At minimal, this effort will be an improvement on his previous endeavors during the budget discussions of the last 2 weeks where he studiously avoided getting himself involved in the Reid-Boehner discussions until the last few days, for the obvious political (and very hollow) reason of not wanting to soil his "I-am-above-the-fray-of-partisan-politics" image.

However, as the New York Times reports, this upcoming speech will simply list budget-cutting goals and omit any specificities on how to achieve those goals. I am sorry, but as President, he needs to tell the public something far more substantive than a few numbers that anyone can easily obtain through a search on Google. To simply avoid listing specific details for fear that opponents might attack you for those ideas is a textbook example of political cowardice. How in the world did he go from "Yes we can" to "Hmmm ... maybe we should not talk about this"? It is yet another example of his vapid style of leadership that prioritizes poll numbers over quality results.

Democrats will respond by saying that Republican budget plans like the one Paul Ryan recently shared are nothing more than blueprints to impose their ideological predilections on American society and those plans are based on economic predictions that can be described as sheer fantasy. For example, Ryan's plan estimates that by cutting taxes, unemployment can be brought down to as little as 2.8%, a number last seen during the Korean war. However, as much as I disagree with the Ryan plan, I can at least give him some credit for the courage to propose something with a good amount of details.

As Paul Krugman writes in his most recent article in the New York Times, Obama is "clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend American partisan differences.... if you ask me, I'd say the nation wants - and more important, the nation needs - a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that's not what we're seeing."

I could not agree more.