'We're going to have to do... this without the President'

摘要

You just attended the President's speech on reducing the debt. Was it what you expected? No, quite honestly, Charlie, it was pretty much the opposite of what I expected. I had thought that with his invitation [to attend the speech]... he was going to extend an olive branch so he could get on the path to bipartisan solutions. And we got anything but that. We got dramatic distortions of our budget proposal. In the beginning of the week when he sent his campaign manager out to mention he was going to do this speech rather than his Budget Director or his Treasury Secretary, a little red flag went up in my mind. But then when I got to the speech, and we heard this, it was extremely political, very partisan.