Blaming Everybody Else is Not a Winning Strategy

Nile Gardiner in the UK Telegraph looks at Obama's electoral situation and suggests the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train:

Barack Obama has been busily blaming Republicans in Congress for the impasse over the debt talks, painting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as the villain for having the temerity to reject the president’s latest offer. According to a White House official, Obama defiantly declared yesterday: “I have reached the point where I say enough. Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.”

Obama, of course, is no Reagan. And there’s a good reason why Cantor, a highly intelligent and thoughtful leader on Capitol Hill, has rejected Obama’s entreaties – because he doesn’t want the United States to end up like Greece on an epic scale. The United States is on the verge of bankruptcy, after years of profligate federal overspending and thoroughly reckless bailouts, which are now threatening to lower the country’s all-important credit rating.

If his presidency does fall in 2012, which now looks an increasingly strong possibility according to some surveys, President Obama will only have himself to blame. He has spent the best part of the last two and a half years blaming America’s economic ills on the Bush administration, and more recently upon the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. But the American people don’t seem to be buying it. You can only get so far by trying to shift responsibility to the shoulders of others when you are ultimately in charge of running the country, and have been for 30 months, which is an extremely long time in politics.

Read the rest of it here.

Yesterday's Gallup poll showing a Generic Republican handily beating The One certainly must have them worried in the White House, but with an ideologue like Obama, he will be unable to switch gears to meet the challenge in the way Bill Clinton did.