President Obama Doesn't Know His Defense Budget

President Obama had good success at getting media coverage for using the term “Romney Hood” to slur Mitt Romney as an irresponsible and out-of-touch corporate elitist.  The President’s strategy has been to constantly be on the attack to undermine the perceived management skills of his Republican rival and deflect criticism of his Administration’s massive deficit spending and poor economic performance.  

But in the President’s off-the-cuff comments during the same speech he disastrously under-estimated by over three hundred billion dollars his Administration’s total defense spending.  The video of this undisciplined blunder will soon go viral and be plastered on the media to paint President Barack Obama as an irresponsible and out-of-touch political spendthrift. 

Four years ago, Barack Obama as a candidate was remarkably disciplined at not straying from the prepared statements on his teleprompter.  His only major gaff was a recording of remarks ridiculing his opposition at an April private event in San Francisco:      

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

As a fire-storm started to swirl, Obama quickly apologized by saying, “Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.”  He then employed his lawyer skills to rephrase the statement, “But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

As an unknown outsider with only a limited voting record in the United States Senate, Obama was able to campaign as a fiscal conservative against John McCain who blurted: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”  After being elected, Obama made a promise to the American people at his Fiscal Responsibility Summit: “Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.” 

With the President now in his fourth year in office and the nation’s deficit remaining at approximately the $1.3 trillion level, President Obama and his allied Super PACs poured $91 million into eight swing states in an early spending barrage intended to make Romney’s association with Bain Capital a reason to disqualify him as an acceptable challenger for the job of President.  But for all that effort, the poll numbers didn’t move much.  The ABC News/Washington Post and USA Today/Gallup polls show the race deadlocked at 47% and the Rasmussen poll shows Romney ahead. 

That is why it seemed strange that the Obama campaign, that has been hemorrhaging cash in an unsuccessfully attack on the American private sector, would want to crank up the rhetoric to attack his challenger for not wanting to raise taxes on the private sector by another $5 trillion over the next ten years.  But at a fundraiser in Connecticut, President Obama delivered his scripted critique of his Republican rival’s tax plan:

“He’d ask the middle class to pay more in taxes so that he could give another $250,000 tax cut to people making more than $3 million a year. It’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” Obama said. “It’s Romney Hood.”

The term, which drew the loudest applause and triggered a flood of buzz online, was coined not by Obama or his speechwriters, but by a team of Democratic strategists at Priorities USA Action, a Super PAC which floated the concept last week. 

But in an unscripted remark trying to compare the $500 billion a year tax increase to the equivalent of the annual United States defense budget, Obama proclaimed:

“Just to give you a prospective here, our entire defense budget is about $500, it’s over $500 billion, but it is less than $600.”

Actually, the “entire defense budget” spending according to the independent usgovernmentspending.com website was $730 billion when Barack Obama was first inaugurated as President.  The “entire defense budget” has grown in each of the last four fiscal years and is conservatively estimated to be $900 billion in 2012 and in 2013.   

Given that the President is the Commander and Chief of the military and defense is the largest single category of spending in the entire federal budget at 24%. President Obama is sure to get slammed by tens of millions of liberals, conservatives and independents who all have visceral opinions about the size and merits of the defense budget.  Barack Obama promised hope and change as an outsider when he ran for President.  Now that he is President, voters expect him responsible with their money.