Regrets for embarrassing the unembarrassable
by digby
One of the main events of the Obama first term that thrilled progressives and showed a very tough Obama persona turns out to have been an error:
President Obama told author Bob Woodward that he didn’t know Rep. Paul Ryan was going to attend at a major speech he delivered last year on spending and debt, and says in retrospect that it was “a mistake” to dress down Ryan and his budget plans to his face in that setting.
In the interview conducted July 11 — about a month before Ryan was tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate – the president also misstated the first name of the man who is now on the opposing presidential ticket.
“I’ll go ahead and say it – I think that I was not aware when I gave that speech that Jack Ryan was going to be sitting right there,” the president told Woodward according to audio transcripts of their conversations, provided to ABC News.
“And so I did feel, in retrospect, had I known – we literally didn’t know he was going to be there until – or I didn’t know, until I arrived. I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him,” Obama continued. “We made a mistake.”
Yes, that would have made all the difference.
Oh well, tomorrow is another day.
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