One might think that the financial collapse would encourage people to use some caution when choosing terms for their proposals. National Review notes that Barack Obama hasn’t quite figured that out, especially when discussing credit cards:

President Obama, flitting from crisis to crisis without ever quite managing to solve one, has alighted upon credit cards. He summoned a dozen credit-card executives to Washington and dressed them down. Finding credit-card statements difficult to read, Obama proposes to put the wordsmiths of the federal government in charge of reforming them. He also proposes to manage interest rates and fees, the size of the type on bills, the content of card issuers’ websites, and the ease of comparison-shopping among competing cards. As the commercial says, there’s a card that’s right for you — and the president believes he knows which it is: “Every credit-card issuer has to issue a plain-vanilla, easy-to-understand, simplest-possible credit card that would be the default credit card that the average user can feel comfortable with.” Default may be a poor word choice in the context of credit, but the message is clear: You yahoos are going to eat your plain vanilla, and you’re going to like it.

A default credit card? How appropriate, given Obama’s demand for fiscal control after launching a spending spree that will run trillion-dollar deficits for the next decade.  You’d have to have a default credit card to handle that kind of irresponsibility.  Maybe Obama would be better off without a credit card at all.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!