New Obama defense - "He's not lying - he just doesn't understand the budget..."

Among the items that the President lied about during Monday nights debate was the source of the sequestration component of the last budget deal, which is going to result in across the board budget cuts if there's not a new budget deal. But apparently, he's got defenders willing to argue that he really wasn't lying. About sequestration, anyway...

Bob Woodward:

“What the president said is not correct,” Woodward told POLITICO Tuesday. “He’s mistaken. And it’s refuted by the people who work for him.”

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During the debate, however, Obama said the idea originated on Capitol Hill.

“First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed,” Obama said, adding his strongest pronouncement to date on its future: “It will not happen.”

Woodward said there’s a possibility the president was unaware of how the idea came about.

“It’s a complicated process — and in fairness to the president — maybe he didn’t know that they were doing this because it’s kind of technical budget jargon,” Woodward said.

Well, that's a hell of a slogan for the campaign. "Four more years! He didn't screw up the budget intentionally, he just didn't know what he was doing!"

Of course, not knowing what he's doing, economically speaking, is a far more generous assessment of his term than the alternative...

Three political gifts for Romney-Ryan

Does the new Bob Woodward book shine a glaring light on the limitations of President "Dunning-Kruger" Obama? Jen Rubin suggests that the answer is, "yes."

But the most alarming news for the Democrats, I think, came in the early release of excerpts from the new book by The Post’s Bob Woodward, “The Price of Politics.” The day after former president Bill Clinton spoke, reminding us of a gregarious, deal-making and effective president, and the day of Obama’s big speech to plead for four more years, comes an account that suggests the president failed to lead in the debt-ceiling fight, has been manhandled by Congress and is frankly not well liked.

The retelling of the debt-ceiling negotiations, and of Obama’s decision to up the ante by $400 billion on taxes, reminds us that Obama, in essence, spiked the deal.

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Mostly what comes through in the initial excerpts is the arrogance, a man whose self-image is vastly out of kilter with his abilities. “Woodward’s portrait of Obama, sketched through a series of scenes from meeting rooms and phone calls, reveals a man perhaps a bit too confident in his negotiating skills and in his ability to understand his adversaries.” He considered the speaker a Republican rube. He treated business leaders disrespectfully as well

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It is not merely a portrait of a man who failed in his most critical domestic challenge; it is a portrait of someone unable to do the job. By putting meat on the bones of the Republicans’ arguments, Woodward, maybe more than Jerusalem and God, has created a whole new problem for the president’s effort to persuade voters to keep him on for four more years.