THE 10 PERCENT PRESIDENT:   This is shaping up to be an election of percentages:  99% (Occupy Wall Street); 47% (Mitt Romney), and now, in a brilliant editorial by the WSJ, 10% (Barack Obama).  In an upcoming 60 Minutes interview of the President by Steve Croft, who pointed out that the national debt has soared 60% under Obama’s watch, received this response from Mr. Obama:

 “Well, first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here,” Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough, so here’s his context in full, with our own annotation and translation below:

“When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

“Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.“

In a series of 7 “footnotes,” the WSJ editors then rip apart Obama’s response line by line.  A classic, must read.