'Obama’s Biggest Challenge Thursday, One Of His Own Making'

From TPM here. With unemployment being the people's No. 1 concern and the country's biggest problem, Obama should never have bought into the deficit-reduction, austerity mania. See Paul Krugman here.

Meanwhile, in the United States it was the Very Serious People — the WaPo editorial page, the Bowleses and Simpsons and those who extolled them, who declared that our top priority must be deficit reduction now now now, and have left us slashing spending to fend off imaginary bond vigilantes at a time of mass unemployment and record low interest rates.

I didn't originally support Obama, since I'd been afraid he'd do something like this - take his eye off the bouncing ball.

From John Aravosis here

President Obama is the one who decided to embrace deficit cutting mania long before the economy was out of the woods, and he has only himself to blame for why he now has very few, if any, politically palatable options for rescuing us from this economic disaster before he faces a very difficult re-elect next year.

A comment to Aravosis's post:

At the time Paul Krugman, et al, were still screaming about the inadequacy of the stimulus, President Obama decided that the political winds were all in favor of deficit reduction, despite the huge gap in demand that still weighed down the economy. This is a self-inflicted wound on Obama's part and even a late epiphany won't save him. His presidency was lost when his asshole pollsters (and probably Axelrod and Emmanuel) told him to cut sharply to the center. The problem was that the center is really pretty much Herbert Hoover. The right is Ayn Rand, and that dead bitch is winning.