Obama through the looking glass(es)

Obama is a radical socialist who vastly increased government spending, saddled our grandchildren with debt and expanded government control of every aspect of Americans' lives.

Obama is a naive weakling who let Republicans frame the agenda in 2011, was seduced by a siren song of compromise, and capitulated to the Tea Party hostage-takers, agreeing to massive spending cuts without winning any revenue increases. 

I'd like to accuse Republicans of the doublethink required to embrace both narratives, but they never really bought into the second -- at best, they projected "weak Obama" onto the foreign policy stage (a bit of a stretch in light of Obama's apparent 'got the sucker' lethality, whatever you think of the wisdom of his various covert and low-key military operations). The capitulator-in-chief narrative belongs to disappointed progressives.

Still, given the Rube Goldberg two-stroke spending cut apparatus that Obama signed onto on August 1 this year, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the Wall Street Journal editorialists' lump-of-coal lament today:

The adminstration's last bullet against economic stagnation?

Back in 2008, as the mortgage crisis metastasized,  FDIC chair Sheila Bair, a Bush appointee, was for it.  John McCain,  under tutelage of his economic advisor, former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, was for it (twice, in two forms). In early 2009, leading Senate Republicans were for it. Today, former Reagan Council of Economic Advisers Chair Martin Feldstein is for it. And we learn it today's FT that Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers chair, is also for it.

"It" is large-scale mortgage relief for underwater homeowners. Bair, McCain-Holtz-Eakin, and Feldstein called for principal writedowns. Hubbard wants interest rates reduced to today's low levels: