UPDATED: Fuel-on-the-Firer-in-Chief
How charming! The President thinks the Tea Parties were a game. Oh, they were no game, Mr. President. They’re for real.
You must have been off-prompter when you “responded” to the Tea Parties (probably a knee-jerk reaction to the crowds who welcomed him in St. Louis today). Otherwise, the President just threw down the gauntlet; and the Tea Party movement will be glad to answer the challenge.
To be precise, Obama was dissembling and refocusing the argument in terms of entitlements and the old saw of “the mess the previous administration left us with”:
“I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we’re going to stabilize Social Security…. [L]et’s not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the Recovery Act because that’s just a fraction of the overall problem that we’ve got.”
Mr. President, this is not about you and your plans as much as it is about our country’s fiscal health. Tea Partiers don’t care about how much of the deficit was caused by Bush and how much was caused by you. They don’t care which network pushed it more aggressively and which didn’t. What they care about is that you will make the deficit even bigger than it already is.
And that’s why – if anyone’s playing games here – it’s you, Mr. President. But I guess you don’t have to have all the fun. Let’s play a game in which we bet which – your agenda or the Tea Party movement – will outlast the other. My money is on the big crowds.
UPDATE: The AP doesn’t seem to be in on Obama’s games. Funny how that happens: AP catches Obama disowning the deficit he helped create (H/T: Instapundit).
