HE JUST CAN'T HELP IT – AT 8:35 A.M. ET:  This president is a continuing campaign.  More comfortable as candidate than as elected official, Barack Obama is at his most normal when in campaign mode, like yesterday.  Even the liberal-tilting Politico has noticed:

President Barack Obama extended a fiscal olive branch to Republicans on Wednesday. Then he beat them up with it.

Obama’s long-anticipated speech on the deficit at George Washington University was one of the oddest rhetorical hybrids of his presidency – a serious stab at reforming entitlements cloaked in a 2012 campaign speech that was one of the most overtly partisan broadsides he’s ever delivered from a podium with a presidential seal.

The centerpiece was a battle cry to his base, a call for $1 trillion in new taxes on the rich – on top of billions saved by allowing Bush-era tax cuts to lapse — in lieu of the deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and now identified with the GOP.

Liberals, for the most part, were assuaged. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said Obama’s call for $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years was “much better than many of us feared.” His conclusion:“I can live with this.”

But the combative tenor of Obama’s remarks, which included a swipe at his potential GOP challengers in 2012, may have scuttled the stated purpose of the entire enterprise - starting negotiations with Republicans on a workable bipartisan approach to attacking the deficit...

...“This was not a speech designed for America to win the future, this was a speech designed for the president to attempt to win re-election,” snarled Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the No. 4 in House Republican leadership.

As president, Mr. Obama is a consummate amateur.  He even swiped the "king of amateurs" award from Jimmy Carter, who now must be resentful.  The late Democratic House speaker Tip O'Neill famously said, "Only amateurs stay mad." 
The president's intense partisanship yesterday, at a time when the public was demanding that he and the GOP work together, was the mark of an amateur. 

Look, maybe he needs more practice.  He's only been president a little over two years.  Give the man the full four years to sharpen up.  Then that second term will be fabulous!

Oh dear.

April 14,  2011