He's Only Stuck If He Lets Himself Be

huffingtonpost.com — There was a headline in the Washington Post on Sunday that completely summarizes the Republicans' fondest dreams as well as the expectations of the D.C. establishment's conventional wisdom: "Debt Crisis Expected to Define Obama's Second Term." It's a reminder of something I learned when I first came to D.C.: the conventional wisdom in D.C. is almost always wrong. Indeed, it is hard to think of one big time over the last 20 years when the conventional wisdom turned out to be right. This isn't to say deficits won't continue to be an issue -- the House Republicans will make sure of that. And Democrats and progressives should certainly engage in the debate over how to bring deficits down over the long run. At the end of the day, though, it is Barack Obama who will determine whether, as the headline suggested, debt and deficits will define Obama's second term. That will only be true if he lets it be.

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