Kerry blames Tea Party for downgrade

I believe that this is without question the Tea Party downgrade,” Sen John Kerry, D-Mass., told David Gregory this morning on Meet the Press. “This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal to do $4.7 trillion, $4 trillion, [that had] a mix of reductions and reforms in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but also recognize that we needed to do some revenue,” Kerry finished.

Kerry and his fellow Democrats face an uphill climb if they want to pin the S&P’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating on the Tea Party. The Wall Street Journal has been calling the imminent slide “The Obama Downgrade” since July 15th. A google search of “Obama downgrade” yields over 70,000 results. The “Tea Party downgrade” shows barely over a thousand results. There is even a TheObamaDowngrade.com website up already.

And as The Examiner’s Phil Klein explained Friday, the case for Obama’s ownership of the downgrade is strong on the merits:

Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package — one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction — he didn’t even attempt it.

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