President Barack Obama must carry the blame for the failure of the debt crisis supercommittee because he was “absent from the whole process,” Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.
“With no disrespect intended, it’s been like Where’s Waldo?” she said. “Where’s the president been?
“He wasn’t a part of the debate last summer dealing with raising the debt ceiling,” she added. “And he hasn’t been part of this whole supercommittee process.
“He’s been AWOL on leadership. Now the president is coming out and he’s sending out Rahm Emanuel to tell everyone that it’s the Republicans’ fault,” said Bachmann, whose new book is entitled
“Core of Conviction: My Story.”
But the Minnesota congresswoman pointed out that GOP legislators bent to such an extent that they were willing to raise taxes if that is what it took to get a deal.
“The problem was the fact that the president had no interest whatsoever in solving this problem and so now here we are, back exactly where we were before — only worse because now we’re deeper in debt.”
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The only solution is for the entire Congress to get together and sort out the mess rather than leave it to a hand-selected dozen members, whose failure, she said, came as “no surprise.”
“Last summer, I was the lone voice in the wilderness of Washington that said we had enough revenue coming in to pay the interest on the debt so we wouldn’t default.
“All 535 members needed to sit down last summer, and we needed to cut the spending so that we didn’t need to continue to borrow $2.4 trillion that we didn’t have.
“There is absolutely no reason why we couldn’t have sat down last summer and solved our budget problem. Here we are five, six months later literally hundreds of billions of dollars more in debt, and there is no solution on the horizon.”
The public should be outraged at the committee’s failure, Bachmann said, noting that a family of four’s share of the national debt went up by $2,300 in October alone.
“That’s not for the year, that’s for one month. The government is so overspending money that, quite literally, we can’t earn money fast enough to pay off the debts the government is taking on.
“That’s why the supercommittee is a super failure — because they are continuing to keep us in a debt spiral the likes of which we have never seen before.
“We don’t want to turn into Argentina in the 1940s or Germany in the 1920s, but President Obama and the supercommittee are ensuring that we could be looking at a very serious economic fall-out from this failure.”
Now, Bachmann said, the country has to worry about the automatic sequestration that is supposed to kick in, with half of the $1 trillion-plus coming from the defense budget and the other half from domestic programs.
“The cuts that people are most worried about are those to defense because we’re engaged in four wars right now: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and also in Uganda. We’re involved in four conflicts.
“Never before in the history of the United States have we cut resources for our military while they are out trying to do the job that we have asked them to do. This is incomprehensible. No one can understand why the president would go this route . . . his foreign policy and his economic policy are incoherent and incomprehensible.”
Bachmann was adamant that, despite her low poll ratings, she will pull off a victory in the Iowa caucuses which then will propel her into contention for the rest of the GOP primary season.
“There’s only been one true, meaningful election in the race so far, that was the Iowa straw poll,” she insisted. “It’s the most similar to a primary or a caucus.
“I got into the race later than any other candidate, and I won, and I’m the first woman in the history of the straw poll ever to win.”
She said her campaign has identified more supporters than 2004’s Iowa victor, Mike Huckabee, had at this stage. Her advantage over many of her rivals is that, with her, what you see is what you get she said.
“There’s no surprises with me, no funny YouTube clips where I’m making contradictory statements.
“I’m calling people just to come home and go with the candidate that’s a constitutional, consistent conservative. I won’t let you down because I have proven myself as someone who means what she says and says what she means and that’s what we need in our next president of the United States, someone we can count on, someone who’s true blue, a strong social, fiscal, national security and tea party conservative.”
And once she has won the Republican nomination, Bachmann said she “can’t wait” to debate Obama during the campaign run-up to the general election and “hold him accountable for how he’s failed the American people both on national security and in the economy.”
Bachmann confirmed that she had a fourth meeting with businessman Donald Trump on Monday, but she would not disclose what they had discussed. She did say it was not about any possible third party run for either of them.
“A third party is not a good idea for any candidate to run. I certainly wouldn’t run one, and I wouldn’t want Donald Trump to run a third-party candidacy either because we want to make sure we do everything we can to ensure that Barack Obama will be one-term president.”
Editor’s note: To get Michele Bachmann’s new book, “Core of Conviction: My Story” — Go Here Now.