Wow. Just wow. I saw some clips of President Obama’s speech and read the text. The speech is probably the most dishonest and demagogic speech I’ve seen since Moammar Gaddafhi gave that one a few weeks back. First from ABC News’ Jake Tapper:

President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:

“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

President Obama today:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.  And who are those 50 million Americans?  Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome.  Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care.  These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

Just to set the record straight. Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan doesn’t change Medicare for anyone 55 years of age or older. So the idea that Grandma’s going to be thrown out in the street if Ryan’s plan passes is a lie. Second, let’s not forget what the end result of Obama’s do-nothing approach: Medicare is going broke anyway. It cannot be sustained as it is. So Obama’s promise to defend it is a lie. Simply repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich cannot save Medicare, let alone Social Security or pay the interest on the ever-increasing debt.

Some points from Paul Ryan (via Jennifer Rubin):

• Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security — puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
• Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year . . .
• Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?
• Instead of proposing structural reforms that would actually reduce health care costs, the President proposed across-the-board cuts to current seniors’ care.
• Strictly limits the amount of health care seniors can receive within the existing structure of unsustainable government health care programs.
• Gives more power to unelected bureaucrats in Washington to determine what treatments seniors should or shouldn’t get, against a backdrop of costs that continue to rise.
• Conceded that the relentlessly rising cost of health care is the primary reason why the nation is threatened by debt, and implicitly conceded that his health care law failed to solve the problem.
• Eviscerates the only competitive element anywhere in health-care entitlement programs — the competition amongst Part D prescription-drug plans — which allowed the drug benefit to come in 41 percent under budget.
• Acknowledges that the open-ended financing of Medicaid is a crippling financial burden to both states and the federal government, but explicitly rejected the only solution to this problem, which is to give states the freedom they need to design systems that work for the unique needs of their own populations.

If there’s one thing you should take away from President Obama’s speech it’s this: There will be no move toward solving this problem at least for the next 18 months. Obama’s in campaign mode now, not leadership mode. (Not that he’s ever actually been in leadership mode, e.g. outsourcing the stimulus to Congress, outsourcing Obamacare to Congress, etc.)

The question we’re going to have to face is this: Is Obama Carter II or FDR V? Both of them presided over crummy economic circumstances and through their actions made them worse. Carter didn’t have the charisma to distract attention from stagflation and a misery index in the high teens; FDR was able to to rally the American people behind him despite his poor economic leadership. No matter who the GOP nominee is in 2012, he or she has to be better than what we’ve got now.

(Please, please Chris Christie run. I’m OK with you committing suicide then running. Even your reanimated zombie corpse would be better than Obama.)