Nothing unusual from the Chicago thug occupying the White House. Erskine Bowles was appointed by Obama to co-chair his deficit commission. Bowles continues to point out that Obama is a fraud & failure, his budget was a joke and Paul Ryan is the only one taking the deficit and entitlements seriously. Everything Obama has done is political.
During a presentation at the Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council” in November 2011, Democrat Erskine Bowles placed blame for the failure of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform on a “cabal” of Chicago politicians surrounding President Obama. Bowles said the group convinced Obama to stand aside and let Rep. Paul Ryan lead the way on budget reform in order to gain a political advantage over Republicans.
In November 2011, The Wall Street Journal assembled over 100 CEOs of top companies to hear from political leaders on a range of financial topics. There were dozens of featured speakers from both sides of the aisle including Eric Cantor, Timothy Geithner, Jon Huntsman, Jack Lew, Paul Ryan and both co-chairs of the Simpson Bowles commission. During their presentation, the two men were asked why their recommendations were not adopted or advanced by the President.
Bob Reynolds, Putnam Investments: Your presidential commission delivered your report in December. How surprised were you that your commission gave the president tremendous coverage to do something, and it wasn’t even mentioned in the State of the Union?
Erskine Bowles: If you think you were surprised, you should have looked at us. I negotiated the budget for President Clinton. And every investment banker will tell you the key to success is knowing your client and defining success up front. So, I knew what success was on his part, and I could go in there and negotiate the deal. I did not know President Obama, and neither did Alan. So, we spent a tremendous amount of time with him and his economic team up front defining success. And we negotiated a deal that got a majority of Republicans to vote for it, so he had plenty of cover on the other side. It also exceeded every single one of the goals that he had given us. I fully expected them to grab hold of this. If it had been President Clinton, he would have said, “God, I created this, this is wonderful. It was all my idea.” So we were really surprised.
My belief is that most of the members of the economic team strongly supported it. Like every White House, there’s a small cabal of people that surround the president that he trusts and works with, and I believe it was those Chicago guys, the political team that convinced him that it would be smarter for him to wait and let Paul Ryan go first, and then he would look like the sensible guy in the game.