I agree with what John said. Standard & Poor’s downgrade of America’s credit rating is a crushing political blow to President Obama. It reinforces, perhaps like nothing else has, the impression Obama is overseeing, and in some respects engineering, the decline of the American republic.
There is a great deal that will unfold in the next 15 months, of course, and often events that seem monumental at the time are later seen as trivial and forgotten. That may be the case here, though I rather doubt it. What S&P did will have far-reaching psychological (and not simply economic) ramifications on the country. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if, when the history of the Obama presidency is written, what occurred on Friday night will be seen as the point of no return, a moment from which Barack Obama will never fully recover. The reason is because the downgrading of our credit rating isn’t an isolated event; for many people it
will be seen as the nearly inevitable outcome of an extraordinarily reckless set of policies, implemented by a man of unusual incompetence.
Mark August 5, 2011 on your political calendar. I suspect David Axelrod, to his chagrin, already has.