No Negotiating on a Debt Limit Extension!

That is exactly the stance President Barack Obama is taking. I wonder how many Americans would vote for increasing America’s debt load again rather than cutting spending. I doubt that there has ever been a more tone-deaf president in the Oval Office. This guy simply does not care what you think or apparently what Congress thinks or for that matter what the Constitution has to say on any matter. If President Obama ever had a grip on the reins of government, he has long since lost his grip. Americans have largely tuned out this president, and Congress certainly has. Here The Wall Street Journal editorial board explains that the president has called off his war on Syria to instead begin one on Congressional Republicans.

Mr. Obama declares that he won’t even deign to negotiate over an extension of the debt limit, which expires within a month or two. And he carpet-bombs Republicans only two weeks after House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor took a political risk and declared they’d vote for the President’s Syrian war resolution against the views of most of their own Members.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Obama wants a showdown with Congress that ends with a government shutdown or a dance with default. He can then mount an offensive against Republicans that will rally his base, which soured on his Syrian plans and vetoed Larry Summers for the Federal Reserve. With his domestic agenda dead on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama may also figure that stigmatizing Republicans over a shutdown-default crisis is the only way that Democrats can retake the House in 2014.

The question is how well all of this will play with a war-weary public. Mr. Obama is no longer the fresh young idealist President, and Americans are beginning to figure out his methods. Like Assad and Mr. Putin, they may conclude that he’s no longer a President whose words they can take seriously.