National Journal’s Ron Fournier was apparently among those who endured President Obama's appearance on "60 Minutes" this evening.
Fournier was able to succinctly summarize the contents of Obama's interview with Steve Kroft, the network's designated softball pitcher, in a tweet appearing shortly after its conclusion (HT Twitchy):
The actual transcript of the Kroft-Obama interview indicates that the CBS reporter mildly challenged Obama on occasion. But when he did, he got excerpts from tired speeches and blame-shifting in response, vindicating Fournier's tweeted take.
Obama is still playing his "woe was us" tale from late 2008:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: But if you think about what I walked into when I came into office, we had not only two wars still active, but we also had a world financial system, which was becoming unraveled. And we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. So you know, we've had challenges before. And we've overcome them. That's not to downplay the serious challenges that we do face right now, mostly internationally.
Kroft failed to challenge Obama's recent conversion to American exceptionalism, allowing the President to mouth non sequiturs in responsee to specific questions about foreign policy:
OBAMA: ... America leads. We are the indispensable nation. We have capacity no one else has. Our military is the best in the history of the world. And when trouble comes up anywhere in the world, they don't call Beijing. They don't call Moscow. They call us.
... when there's a typhoon in the Philippines, take a look at who's helping the Philippines deal with that situation. When there's an earthquake in Haiti, take a look at who's leading the charge and making sure Haiti can rebuild. That's how we roll. And that's what makes this America.
Kroft is apparently unaware of, or has chosen to ignore, the fact that Obama promised Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" after the 2012 elections:
STEVE KROFT: We have a very complicated situation going on right now between NATO and Russia. What's your relationship with President Putin? Do you have a personal relationship?
OBAMA: Well, I've always had a business-like relationship with him and it's blunt and it's firm.
No Kroft interview as an election approaches would be complete without him allowing a liberal time for a free campaign commercial:
KROFT: Or do you think that, I mean, are you optimistic? What are the issues and what are you going to tell the American people?
OBAMA: Here's what I'm going to tell the American people. When I came into office, our economy was in crisis. We had unemployment up at 10 percent. It's now down to 6.1. We've had the longest run of uninterrupted private sector job growth in our history. We have seen deficits cut by more than half. Corporate balance sheets are probably the best they've been in the last several decades. We are producing more energy than we had before. We are producing more clean energy than we ever had before. I can put my record against any leader around the world in terms of digging ourselves out of a terrible, almost unprecedented financial crisis. Ronald Reagan used to ask the question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" In this case, are you better off than you were in six? And the answer is, the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office ...
That's enough.
The federal government has taken on over $7 trillion in additional debt and is still running $500 billion-plus annual deficits. There is nothing on the horizon indicating that either situation will improve from where they are now.
Obama conveniently identified the benhmark for genuine improvement. No one can reasonably characterize the nation as "better off" than it was before the Democrat-instigated housing mess led the nation into the Great Recession, i.e., when what I have called the Pelosi-Obama-Reid economy began in roughly May of 2008.
Barack "I, Me, My" Obama instead benchmarks progress against the decay he and his party instigated long before he ever took office. The press has let him get away with that for years. That Kroft didn't break the ice and challenge Obama's nonsense is a complete non-surprise.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
