New National Review Online piece: Obama Lacks Credibility as a Leader on Spending Cuts

My piece at National Review starts this way:

Is President Obama really the Deficit-Cutter-in-Chief? After so obviously racking up massive deficits through his various stimulus programs, President Obama is now trying to portray himself as a leader in the effort to solve this problem. Time after time on yesterday’s Sunday morning talk shows, White House senior adviser David Plouffe said that Obama’s 2012 budget already proposes to reduce the deficits over the next decade by $1 trillion. Surprisingly, not a single host challenged him on his math.

Plouffe asserted: “Well, first, on the 2012 budget, that would be $1 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade and lowest level of domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower. And he said it in the State of the Union, that was just a start.” He told this to Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, and he repeated it almost word for word on NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

These assertions of bold deficit-cutting are absurd. . . .