Barrel Strength

Obama stated the following in an ABC interview this morning.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” the president said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

After blaming Bush for Coakley’s loss, he then goes on to state the following.

If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.

This from somebody who averaged more than one talk or interview per day.

Update

NYT’s resident idiot, Paul Krugman, says that Obama didn’t blame Bush enough!  You can’t make this up.

… Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.