But, politically, pretending to care about our debt makes one a “serious person”.

You may distrust Bloomberg’s motives, but the sentiments he voiced – that Obama failed to exercise leadership in this debate – have been expressed by any number of pundits, and not all of them the usual Republican suspects. In the wake of the supercommittee’s failure, of course, pundits on both sides are engaging in the inevitable fingerpointing, and thus for every Milbank charge that it was the Republicans that were obstructionist, there is another pundit citing Democratic intransigence for the failed negotiations. I’ll let others debate who was most culpable. My only point is that while there is undoubtedly enough blame to go around, the bitter partisan fingerpointing simply reinforces my basic point that there really wasn’t any upside for Obama to have gone to the mat with these two groups one more time.

All Obama got was grief with his debt ceiling speeches. He just basically ignored this super-committee stuff and honestly it doesn’t seem like a big story, probably b/c he didn’t involve himself.

If he had involved himself, it still would have collapsed and then that would be seen as a sign of weakness.