Who's to blame...who can fix it?

Politico.com's Mike Allen notes today that the rhetoric about the deficit contains significant problems. He points out an article in the New York Times; the excerpt he offered in his "Playbook" is repeated here:

'There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years. The first is that President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested. The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country's choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it. ... The story of today's deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years. You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush's policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.'

In short, the blame for the debt belongs at the doorstep of former President Bush and the current feeble attempts to fix it belong on the doorstep of President Obama. The typical American voter, for now, is likely to forgive Mr. Obama for swelling the deficit. But how long will that patience last?