THE IMPENDING CRISIS II - AT 10:01 A.M. ET:  It's been standard practice for the current administration to blame BUSH (!!) for every problem it encounters, including drafty windows in the White House.  Why, if it weren't for George W. Bush, Obama could simply go around cutting ribbons.

It's not a new gimmick.  For decades the Democratic Party ran against Herbert Hoover.   

Reader Jean Spik alerts us to a column by David Shribman, in the normally pro-Obama Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, signaling that the old excuses simply don't stand up any longer.  It is now the Obama administration, and maybe Rahm Emanuel should slip a note to the boss alerting him to that unpleasant fact:

There is a moment...in every administration, when the burdens of the predecessor are transferred to the present occupant of the White House. For a while the upheaval in Cuba was Dwight D. Eisenhower's problem. The day in April 1961 when the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed in confusion it became John F. Kennedy's problem (and part of his presidential identity), even though he was reading from the Eisenhower playbook. For weeks, even months, Vietnam was a problem to be blamed on Kennedy, or Eisenhower, or the French, but eventually it became Lyndon Johnson's war and, following that, Richard Nixon's.

Mr. Obama's...moment came in the last week or so, though it is impossible to specify the precise moment it arrived.

And...

Now, as the Obama era unfolds, there increasingly is less patience for the familiar arguments that the war in Iraq started in obfuscation, that the conflict in Afghanistan was ignored for too long, that a lethal combination of lax regulation and laissez-faire fever pushed the economy to the brink, and that Iran spun out of control while Americans focused on lesser threats in the region. All that might be true, but it can no longer be part of the Obama repertoire.

And...

For now that the Bush era is in the past and we are clearly in the Obama years, the president faces new tests, offering us new opportunities for reaping new insights about the man who occupies the Oval Office. Indeed, moments like this are unusually revelatory. At the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy admitted a mistake and changed course. At the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson hunkered down and continued the direction the Kennedy administration had set out. At those moments, we learned something important about both men.

This is the context in which to view President Obama's much-maligned decision to change the nation's anti-missile strategy by abandoning missiles and radar in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of a sea-based defense.

Now the president faces similar questions about Afghanistan and Iraq -- and about the American economy at home.

Finally...

With unemployment at 9.8 percent, the highest in a quarter-century, it no longer is enough to blame President Bush. It's Mr. Obama's problem now.

COMMENT:  But will he see it as his problem?  This is  president whose main weapon is his mouth.  He seems to feel that he can talk his way out of anything, and talk his way into the presidency, which he's done.  He does not, unlike Kennedy, admit mistakes.  His vendetta against Fox News indicates that he's running, as several commentators have charged, the most think-skinned administration in recent memory. 

It may be Obama's moment.  But he has a tendency to turn the clock ahead.

October 19, 2009