With their fabricated debt ceiling fiasco, the GOP has tested the President’s patience and not found it wanting. As the deadline nears, the question is: What will it take to enrage him?
Barack Obama is edging into testy now: "This is actually a self-created crisis in some ways. It has to do with folks who are digging into set positions rather than saying how do we solve a problem.”
But as polls show overwhelming majorities of voters worried and disgusted at Tea Party antics, why is their President not reflecting their emotions and why is he still acting more like a mediator than a leader rallying them to put pressure on their addled legislators?
Die-hard ideologues keep shooting down each possible solution (the Gang of Six proposal is the latest), making it clear that the country is being held hostage with the clock ticking, but Obama is still sounding relatively sanguine.
“My interest here is not scaring people,” he says about the possibility of not sending out Social Security checks next week, but goes only as far as to say "there is no reason this should be a problem" if all the parties take "a sensible approach" to the issue.
This legislative farce went past “sensible” weeks ago, and the President still keeps backing away from the direct confrontation that seems inevitable. Now he has retreated from his vow against short-term deals, opening the door for an intractable House to keep the country tied in knots indefinitely.
Is there an anti-anger management course he can take that would spur him to make a prime-time speech calling out Boehner, McConnell, Ryan and their gang for what they are doing?
Nobody expects Barack Obama to sound like Harry Truman in his attacks on a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress” that won him reelection in 1948, but in not confronting this Congress head-on, he is letting down the vast numbers of Americans who want sanity in Washington and damaging his own chances at the ballot box next year.
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