That’s how Borat might describe my latest article in Real Clear Politics, “Obama’s hard choices for other people.” Here’s a bit of it:

At the recent G20 summit, President Barack Obama announced that next year he would “start presenting some very difficult choices to the country,” and hoped that “these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt” would “step-up.” In any event, he was “calling their bluff.” The world would soon find out how much of the deficit talk is “real” and how much is “just politics.”

Warnings of the Coming Austerity have been a staple of Obama’s rhetoric for some time. In a debate with John McCain, Obama promised to go through the federal budget “line by line” and take a “scalpel” to spending. The president-elect met in December 2008 with the nation’s governors and warned them that a nation facing “difficult times” would have to make “hard choices.”

Last year, as he was pushing a huge stimulus package, the president called for his Cabinet departments to collectively cut $100 million out of their appropriation requests to Congress. This year, even as he was pushing his expensive healthcare bill, Obama also called for a spending freeze of much discretionary spending.

Obama may speak of tough choices but he has been remarkably unwilling to make them, or to force his close allies to do so. [more...]