OK, Obama, you are naive

Gloria Borger:

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"Call me naive," President Obama said at his news conference today. "But my expectation is that leaders are going to lead."

Mine, too.

So imagine my surprise when the president came to his own press conference -- which he called -- without anything much new to say on possible ways get to a deal to raise the national debt ceiling. Plenty of talk about gamesmanship, about deadlines and about how even Sasha and Malia are mature enough to do their schoolwork before it's due.

Oh, and by the way, the president also told us, Congress isn't actually here enough to get its homework done. "They are in one week, they are out one week," he told us helpfully, as if perhaps we should mark our calendars. "You need to be here. I've been here. I've been doing Afghanistan and Bin Laden and the Greek crisis."

He is, after all, the president. Good to know that he's doing his job.

And it's not that he's wrong about Congress ducking responsibility; it's just hard to see how that counts as news.

What might actually have counted as news is if the president, as the nation's leader, had proposed a definitive way out of the budget mess -- or at least drawn some lines in the sand.

Instead, we learned that we need a "balanced approach" to the debt mess. That Obama is willing to "tackle entitlements" (presuming, of course, that nothing is done to touch Medicare beneficiaries). And that taxes -- the kinds that affect "millionaires and billionaires," corporate titans and their personal jets -- should be on the table.

Just for the record, getting rid of a tax break for corporate jets may be a fine idea, but it isn't going to solve the deficit problem since it will amount to only about $3 billion over the next decade. But it's a good line.

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It seems clear that Obama knows little about leadership when it comes to tough negotiations. You don't get to yes by insulting those you are trying to strike a deal with. I don't think he is acting very smart at a time when he needs to do a deal to avoid a default on debt.