Trying On The Other Guy's Excuses

Some news quotes don't require any additional commentary:

The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary "mess" it's in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.

Obama's Democratic allies pleaded for patience with an administration hitting the two-month mark this week, while Republicans said the White House's plans ignore small business and the immediate need to fix what ails the economy. After weeks projecting a dismal outlook on the economy, administration officials - led by the president himself in recent days - swung their rhetoric toward optimism in what became Wall Street's best stretch since November.

During the fall campaign, Obama relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, for declaring, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Obama's team painted the veteran senator as out of touch and failing to grasp the challenges facing the country.

But on Sunday, that optimistic message came from economic adviser Christina Romer. When asked during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press if the fundamentals of the economy were sound, she replied: "Of course they are sound."

I guess the definition of sound economic fundamentals is, "We won".

This is, of course, a PR retreat.  More specifically, an implicit concession that this economy now belongs to Red Barry and the Dems, lock, stock, and catastrophe.  They got their "stimulus" and they got their FY 2009 omnibus swine bill, and they're not producing any stimulative results (aside from rampant, anger-fueled public ridicule and steadily eroding approval numbers), and they're starting to feel the heat a lot sooner than they were expecting to.  So the Out House has gone into "emergency" spin mode, trying to apply lipstick to B.O.'s economic pig, and they're sounding eerily like the Administration they replaced.  Makes you wonder if they even realize it.

The irony, of course, is that they, like McCain and Bush before them, are basically correct....:

"The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology," [Ms. Romer] said.

....but these and others are precisely the factors that Obamanomics (in the form of his multi-year budget blueprint) will target for destruction.  Indeed, False Messiah's relentless doomsaying in pursuit of exploiting this "crisis" as an "opportunity" to "do things you normally couldn't do" is what has disembowled the value of "good capital stock" and tanked the Dow so precipitously that the Obamunists are having to put on these phony happy faces.

The Little President's credibility, and political capital along with it, have taken a big self-inflicted hit.  If he wants to salvage what's left, he's going to have to make some concessions to politicoeconomic reality.  Problem with that is, then he'd have to abandon his domestic communization dream.

This, then, is Obama's choice: ideological purity and a failed presidency, or adaptation, philosophical apostasy, and political survival.  Put even more concisely, does he want to be Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton?  For a Marxist True Believer, that's the ultimate Hobson's Choice.

What it can't be is a short term gimmick, especially since his earlier fearmongering is entirely identified with his apocalyptic budget proposal.

Ronald Reagan wasn't urging voters to "stay the course" until the fall of his second year in office.  The Dems are already begging that before Lucifer's two month anniversary.

Doesn't get any more short term than that.