The leadership portion of this Presidency is now complete

Obama revealed more than he realized in his Kansas speech this past week, full of florid language, ping-pong teleprompter scanning, and class warfare.  I think a lot of Americans are going to realize that it's all politics and demagoguery from here on out and there won't be a single decision from this White House that doesn't focus on the 2012 election.  The bankruptcy of Obama's Administration can be seen in the paucity of the "solutions" he proposes when he's not bashing the rich.

Here's Charles Krauthammer in the WashPost with "Obama's campaign for class resentment":

As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.
This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.

Michael Barone hits the same note with "Obama's thin gruel at Osawatomie":

But what’s really staggering is the weakness of his public policy arguments. The long-term unsustainability of our entitlement programs he blames solely on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts—an explanation no serious observer regards as anything but incomplete, to say the least. He points to growing income inequality and to remedy it advocates policies that are utterly inadequate to the task.

But let's imagine for a moment that gathering an extra $80 billion a year from the rich - hell, let's just make it $800 billion - is a feasible proposition.  It still wouldn't cover a single year of borrowing (never mind overall spending) and does nothing whatsoever to address the real drivers of our debt.

Oh, and one other thing: when exactly did Obama have this revelation that we could just raise taxes on the upper crust and everything would be cool?  It never, ever, occurred to him during the first two years of his Presidency when he could have passed any old tax hike he wanted without fear of a filibuster.  The Democratically-controlled Congress could have pushed through any budget they wanted.  But that would have involved choices and numbers on a piece of paper.  Coincidentally, the drive to raise taxes only started after Republicans took back control of the House and gained in the Senate, largely on the anti-deficit revulsion of the country manifested in the Tea Party.

Ah, then - finally - Obama had his devil.  There's no need for budgets, or fiscal restraint, or even solutions that make any kind of mathematically sense: just stir that pot of class resentment.  This is now a failure of leadership compounded by a failure of character.

Extra - From Ace.

More - Zero Hedge: "It was deceitful, inaccurate, revisionist, and demagogic."