THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

If Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling on the national debt, America will lose its AAA credit rating, President Barack Hussein Obama said. 

Republican insistence on spending cuts was the greatest obstacle to a debt ceiling deal, and thus to our credit rating, most journalists said.

Both were spectacularly wrong.  Just days after the debt ceiling was raised by the largest amount ever, the stock market crashed, and the bond rating agency Standard & Poors downgraded America‘s credit.

The deficit must be cut by $4 trillion over the next ten years, the bond rating agencies say.  The debt limit bill will trim spending by, at most, $2.4 trillion.  Our credit would have remained AAA if the GOP plan had passed, an S&P executive told Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Journalists have written more about who they think won or lost in the debt limit deal than about whether it actually would reduce our gargantuan debt.

The big winner was President Obama, said columnist and television commentator Craig Crawford.

"The president got what he most wanted, postponing another debt ceiling fight until after the election, without politically damaging entitlement cuts," Mr. Crawford wrote on his blog.

I wonder if Mr. Crawford has been living on another planet.

During the debt ceiling debate, Mr. Obama’s job approval plunged to 40 percent in the Gallup Poll, the lowest level ever.  Concluding the deal he praised won’t lift that much, because Americans oppose it, 46 percent to 39 percent, Gallup found.

Americans oppose the deal for precisely the reason Mr. Crawford claims Mr. Obama "won."  They don’t think it cuts spending enough.

Mr. Obama has been more popular than his policies.  The debt ceiling debate may change that.

"Most striking was how irrelevant the president seemed to the entire debate," wrote Bloomberg columnist Virginia Postrel.  "Obama didn’t present his own alternative to the various congressional plans or make a case for a particular policy.  When he tried to address the public, he came off as condescending, self-interested and detached."

Democrat leaders in Congress were appalled by Mr. Obama’s behavior during the debt negotiations.  At one point, according to The Hill newspaper, the president was asked to leave the room so serious negotiating could be done.

"He’s turning into Jimmy Carter before our eyes," a Democrat senator told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Ever hear of a 1956 movie titled The Man Who Never Was?  It’s a true story, based on the 1953 book of the same title written by the man who conducted it, British military intelligence officer Ewen Montagu.  He got the idea for what was named Operation Mincemeat from his colleague Ian Fleming.  (Their secretary, Patricia Bennett, was the model for Miss Moneypenny, and their boss, Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the model for M in Fleming’s subsequent James Bond novels.)

Montagu secured the corpse of a Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, from a London coroner, dressed him as a fictitious Acting Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, and had him dropped off the coast of Spain chained to a briefcase containing phony plans for an invasion of Greece and Sardinia – assuming, correctly, that the documents would be turned over to German intelligence.  The Germans didn’t realize until two weeks after the invasion of Sicily began that neither Greece nor Sardinia was the real target.

In America today, The Man Who Never Was is the brilliant, politically moderate reformer with a "first class temperament" journalists told us about in 2008.  The petulant, partisan ideologue we saw during the debt ceiling negotiations bears little resemblance to that guy.

The "world class orator" is notoriously dependent upon a teleprompter, and unable to sway public opinion.

"His speeches lack humor and rely on the same focus-grouped platitudes," says Matt Continetti of the Weekly Standard.

The debt limit deal gives Mr. Obama political ownership of our rapidly deteriorating economy, which is why Republicans don’t think they conceded much when they agreed to postpone another debt limit vote until after the election.

Yet Mr. Crawford thinks Mr. Obama "won."

Perhaps he doesn’t, really.  Perhaps journalists have so much invested in the mythical Obama they created they don’t dare show the little man behind the curtain.

"What might once have been dismissed as an embarrassing lapse into bobby soxer squealery now has to be recognized as a desperate attempt to keep a dying euphoria alive," Andrew Klavan writes in City Journal.

But eventually even liberal journalists will turn on Mr. Obama, because his stimulus didn’t stimulate; his regulatory policies kill jobs; his promises about Obamacare have proved to be false.

There are only two credible explanations for these failures.  Either the policies themselves are to blame, or Mr. Obama implemented them badly and has marketed them poorly.

Liberals never admit — especially to themselves — that their ideas are wrong.  So the fault has to be Mr. Obama’s, as even they come to realize he is The Man Who Never Was.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.