Obama is part of stalemate problem

By JONATHAN GURWITZ

New York Times News Service

On the campaign trail in Virginia last week, Vice President Joe Biden warned a mixed race crowd that if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan win in November, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Speaking in Iowa, President Barack Obama tossed out a one-liner referencing a three-decade old story about Romney taking a family vacation with his dog in a carrier on the roof of a station wagon.

So much for hope and change.

Here it’s worth quoting Obama four years ago, as he accepted his party’s presidential nomination: “If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.” Run from the slave trader. Vote for the guy without the dog on the roof.

There are some wonderful ironies in the Obama-Biden strategy of jokes and chains. Back in 2006, Biden cozied up to an audience in South Carolina with the story that his home state of Delaware was “a slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.” Back then, slavery was funny stuff. Y’all.

In his semi-factual memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama discusses eating dog meat with his stepfather in Indonesia. “Tough,” the author notes parenthetically. Again, funny stuff.

So is this what Americans have to look forward to through Nov. 6 — race-baiting and dog jokes? Whatever chance there is that the presidential election will actually be decided on substantive issues, it was enhanced by Romney’s selection of Ryan as his running mate. Ryan has actually authored a budget that puts the country back on a path toward fiscal responsibility. The House of Representatives has passed the Ryan plan — twice in the last two years.

Last year, the Democrat-controlled Senate voted down the Obama budget, 97-0. This year, the budget presented by the president was so unserious that Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to even bring it up for consideration. The last time the Senate actually passed a budget was in 2009.

That’s par for the course. From spending to taxes to entitlement reform, Ryan and Republicans have put forward proposals commensurate with the threat to economic prosperity and national security posed by trillion-dollar deficits, a $16 trillion debt, and a Medicare trust fund that — according to its trustees — will be insolvent by 2024.

Democrats and the White House have done nothing. Actually, worse than nothing. Obama appointed a bipartisan debt commission in 2010 to create the ultimate grand bargain — a package of necessary budget, tax and entitlement reforms for which commission members said, in their final report, they “were willing to put our differences aside to forge a plan because our nation will certainly be lost without one.”

The warning was lost on the president. He shelved the recommendations of his own debt commission. Now in 2012, with no record to run on and no serious proposals of their own, Obama and the Democrats are left to tell jokes and scary stories.

Speaking in Ohio last month, Obama said that there’s no lack of ideas or solutions for the nation’s problems. “What’s holding us back,” he said, “is we’ve got a stalemate in Washington between two visions of where the country needs to go. And this election is about breaking that stalemate.”

That’s a far cry from Obama’s soaring rhetoric in 2008 about ushering in a new era of politics. And the president was pulling another political prank if he was including himself among the problem solvers. But about the need to break the stalemate, he was — unusually for this campaign season — factually correct.