Reacting with indignation to David Frum's assessment that President Barack Obama was a “failure” at the G-20 summit because European leaders “rebuffed” his quest to get them to follow his lead in enacting massive deficit spending, an aghast ABC News veteran Sam Donaldson sputtered that the change in “tone” from former President Bush was more important than substance:
The last President we had that went to Europe, I mean no one wanted to see him. There was great hostility. This President's changed the tone. Just changing the tone was a great plus for the United States.
On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Donaldson conceded Obama “was rebuffed when it came to the great stimulus, yes Germany and France said you can't print Euros like we're printing dollars” but, nonetheless, he declared: “This was the best outcome you could hope for.”
Donaldson, who retired from ABC News a few weeks ago but will continue to appear occasionally on This Week's roundtable, asserted on the April 3 cable show produced in Los Angeles:
The last President we had that went to Europe, I mean no one wanted to see him. There was great hostility. This President's changed the tone. Just changing the tone was a great plus for the United States. He was rebuffed when it came to the great stimulus, yes Germany and France said you can't print Euros like we're printing dollars, but from the standpoint of the $1.1 trillion dollars which everyone pledged to help a lot of nations, a drop in the bucket you say, more than we had before. And the regulations, he bought on to some of that as long as they don't make it just something that controls the United States. This was the best outcome you could hope for.
