Downgrade Blues

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

BARACK OBAMA must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out.

Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

“Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.”

“When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” he told an audience at a Chicago fund-raiser on Wednesday. “Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

True enough, but not F.D.R.-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in United States history.

(More here.)