Obama's new Math.(The Week)(President Barack Obama)

I SHARE this little cubby at the front of the magazine with an economist of national renown. He uses lots of charts and graphs, and when he adds up percentages, the sum actually comes to 100. So the last thing I want to do is poach on his territory. Still, there's something that's been gnawing at me. It's a vague suspicion, a ghost at the edge of conscious thought, a formless query that defies easy articulation. But I will try to put it into words:

What the hell is Barack Obama talking about?

On almost any given day, Obama insists that his predecessor caught small children in a butterfly net and cooked them in hot oil. Oh, wait, sorry; that's Bill Moyers. What Obama goes on and on about is how President Bush was a tightwad who refused to spend a dime on vital domestic priorities. Here's Obama responding to the charge that he's doing too much: "To kick these problems down the road for another four years or another eight years would be to continue the same irresponsibility that led us to this point."

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In his address to Congress, Obama constructed a Potemkin army of straw men, and they were all Republicans and conservatives: "I reject the view that ... says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity." In another speech he boldly rejected "a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government--this constant ...