When asked if it was a mistake to vote against the debt limit as a senator, the president said:
I think that it’s important to understand the vantage point of a Senator versus the vantage point of a…President. When you’re a Senator, traditionally what’s happened is this is always a lousy vote. Nobody likes to be tagged as having increased the debt limit for the United States by a trillion dollars… As President, you start realizing, "You know what? We-- we can’t play around with this stuff. This is the full faith in credit of the United States." And so that was just a example of a new Senator, you know, making what is a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country. And I’m the first one to acknowledge it.
That's a very long winded way of saying that as a senator, he was trying to take political advantage of a situation. But now that he's a president, he has to be an adult.
I'm glad that the president is acknowledging his mistakes. (Even if he is doing that whole "I'm better then most people" thing, while doing it)
What appalls me is that at no point does he recognize how completely craven it was for him to "play politics" with trillions of debt.
