Bully-In-Chief

For a couple of weeks prior to his speech about how he wants to reduce the debt and control spending President Obama made grandiose pronouncements about how we all need to work together. He's on record saying it's counter-productive for the parties to castigate one another via claims that the other side wants to kill grandma and similar kinds of labeling. He's on record saying, multiple times, he wanted to hear a serious Republican proposal and that he'd work with them on resolving differences. He's on record holding an olive branch out to Paul Ryan, the Republican's lead man on debt and budget reform.

For the record, Ryan has gone out of his way not to castigate the opposition by avoiding generalizations about the evil opposition wanting to kill grandma. He took President Obama at his word and accepted the challenge to act like grownups on this subject.

Then President Obama gave that speech about his proposal last week. The list of invitees was interesting. A seat in the front row at such events is normally considered to be a positive gesture by a president. Unfortunately for Ryan, he was set up. President Obama launched into a public(!) castigation of Ryan's budget plan with exactly the kind of vitriol that he asked Republicans not to do and which they, including Ryan, respectfully did not do. Here's what one article in The National Review said about Obama's speech:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/264869/audience-listening-andrew-c-mccarthy

This is not serious leadership by a president on a serious matter facing the country. A leader does NOT publicly castigate one side over the other before any effort is made to get together and reconcile differences. Making a proposal and at the same time castigate the leading opposing proposal is NOT consistent with either wanting to work something out cooperatively or with achieving consensus in the long run. You don't start out a major offensive on a national problem by publicly embarrassing the leader of one side of the argument. Obviously, President Obama knows nothing whatsoever about real diplomacy or, for that matter, decency.

As shocking as President Obama's behavior was, the worst aspect of it is that his speech does more to divide our nation than bring us together. Worse than that, it makes it less likely we'll come up with a decent solution to the problem that fairly represents the interests of those on both sides of the issue. Even worse than that, it makes it less likely we'll arrive at a solution at all. He basically declared war on Ryan's plan, rather than present an attitude of working out our differences. That's NOT how one starts an effort to fix a serious problem the entire nation faces which BOTH parties helped create.

The arrogance of the man is astounding! And it's behavior that's beyond inappropriate for a president of the United States under any circumstances, much less at the beginning of an important national debate.