Obama and Balanced Budget: Blowin' in the Wind

Barack Obama admitted on Wednesday that he’s not interested in seeking a balanced budget, saying, “My goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance.”

My, how times change–in less than a year. During the 2012 campaign, on July 5 in Sandusky, Ohio, Obama asserted, “I want to balance our budget.”

But that was even less egregious than Obama’s famous statement from the beginning of his first term, on February 23, 2009, when he intoned:

Today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.

That’s Obama: broken promises, statements that are tailored for every occasion, and principles that vacillate as wildly as he deems necessary in the never-ending campaign.