The Singing Is Over, Now Comes The Swinging

President Obama gave an interview to the Louisville Courier-Journal and a handful of other papers and his tone was markedly different from his first month in office. It seems at this point the President has taken the gloves off and he is not going to allow the Republicans to obstruct his agenda without a fight.

"I do think that the Republican Party right now hasn't sort of figured out what it's for," Obama said in a White House interview with The Courier-Journal and reporters from five other newspapers. "And so, as a proxy, they've just decided 'we're going to be against whatever the other side is for.' That's not what's needed in an economic crisis."

He added that "you could play that game maybe in the early '90s, when basically we were pretty prosperous. Right now, everybody's got to pull together."

snip

"What we still haven't seen from those who would argue that we're trying to do too much is an alternative budget," Obama said. "And the reason we haven't seen an alternative budget is because they know full well that the real drivers of our deficits long term have almost everything to do with our rising health-care costs."

He said the "problem is Medicare and Medicaid, and we can't fix that unless we fix health care as a whole. That's why our investments are so important."

Needless to say I don't think there will be any more cocktails or lunches with the GOP any time soon in President Obama's future. And you can be sure that I believe thats a good thing.