Obama’s speech: Evidence of just how little the debt deal accomplishes

As Yogi Berra would say, “It’s deja vu all over again.” The president today took to the podium in the White House Rose Garden to purportedly praise the debt ceiling deal that just passed the Senate. Instead, he used the opportunity to call for — yep, you guessed it — “a balanced approach” to deficit reduction in the future.

“The compromise requires that both parties work together on a plan to cut the deficit, and, since you can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach,” Obama said. “Yes, that means making some adjustments to programs like Medicare [to ensure they'll be around in the future.] It also means reforming our tax code to ensure the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who’ve born the biggest brunt of this recession.”

He’s also said this before (or something sure like it), but he said it again anyway:

“Voters may have chosen divided government, but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government. They want us to get the economy growing. Deficit reduction is part of that agenda, but it is not the whole agenda. Growing the economy isn’t just about cutting spending and rolling back regulations that protect our air and water and keep people safe. We’re going to have to do more than that.”

He then launched into calls for a payroll tax cut, a boost to unemployment insurance benefits, an infrastructure bank and the passage of important trade agreements, among other things. It sounded just like the speech he delivered in the same location about a month ago — and I was calling that a repeat speech of an earlier speech. Gotta say this for the guy: He stays on message. The president’s unchanged remarks reveal just how little the debt deal accomplished. All that was missing from the speech were the dire threats of a default. That only, it seems, is different today than yesterday. (For that matter, the unchanged remarks of Republicans also reveal just how irrelevant the deal actually is. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, just took to the floor to highlight the need for deeper spending cuts.)

Listening to the president’s speech, though, I understood for the first time why so many are calling the compromise a victory for Republicans. Completely absent from the president’s remarks were any of the truly self-congratulatory statements that would have characterized such a speech if he had definitively won tax increases. He didn’t even rub it in that he’s free and clear to campaign from now until the election, thanks to the timeline of the debt ceiling increase. But, then again, the fact that he essentially just delivered a stump speech might be his ever-so-clever way of gloating about that — because that’s definitely what this was, evidence of an insubstantial deal and proof that Obama is still the consummate campaigner.

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