A CLARIFICATION

President Obama is right about one thing: he wasn't President when the latest run of high deficits started. It was President Bush who pushed for and signed the first round of bank bailouts and the TARP law. There's just one problem; when President Obama says "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. ... That wasn't me," he's correct that he wasn't president when the deficits were created. He was more directly in charge.

See, in the United States, it is the Congress that decides spending and passes bills. The president is responsible for vetoing or signing a bill, but the members of congress are even more responsible for the spending because they're the ones that craft and write the budget and spending bills. And President Obama - then Senator Obama - voted for the spending he's claiming no responsibility for. And given that as president he pushed for and supported an even more gargantuan, grotesquely gigantic spending bill (one including earmarks and policy ideas he tried to pass as a Senator but ran out of time before the end of his last session), President Obama cannot somehow walk away from responsibility for the overspending.

Even if he'd like to.