The indictment has five headings:  1. Obama has ceased to lead on the economy.  The management guru Stephen Covey famously said: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." Economic recovery is -- or should be -- the main thing. In 2009, Obama advanced a series of bold proposals to accelerate recovery: his big fiscal stimulus, the auto bailout and so on.  The president's proposals did not fail, exactly. But they did not work as advertised. The American economy limps weakly forward, leaving millions out of work.  During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt demanded from his administration "bold, persistent experimentation." By contrast, Obama put measures in place at the beginning and waited for them to yield results. And waited. And waited. And waited.  Finally, at the end of 2010, he added one more measure to the mix: a partial cut to the payroll tax, included as part of the deal that renewed the Bush tax cuts.  The payroll tax holiday is welcome if late. But it was small (2 percentage points out of the 12.6% paid by workers and employers) and was almost immediately offset by the surge in oil prices after the so-called Arab Spring. That surge took back from workers every dollar of the $110 billion in tax relief delivered by the payroll holiday.  And since December, Obama has surrendered entirely to the claim that we can somehow fix the economy by fixing the debt problem. The truth is the opposite: Fix the economy, and the debt problem will shrink to much more manageable proportions.  2. Obama does not effectively use the domestic powers of the presidency.  Talk radio shows accuse Obama of acting like a Third World dictator heading a thug government. That's a devilishly ingenious line of attack on a president who actually makes weaker use of his domestic power than any since Jimmy Carter.
If the debt ceiling crisis were a movie, President Barack Obama would deserve an Oscar for his performance in the role of "the last reasonable man."But of course the crisis is not a movie. The