MICHAEL BARONE: Chasing Votes By Promising To Do Impossible Things.

“Leading from behind.” That’s what an unnamed White House aide told the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that Barack Obama was doing on Libya.

It’s an apt description of Obama’s feckless handling of the debt ceiling debate. He kept calling for a tax increase even though there was never a majority in either house of Congress for one and even after Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid dropped any such demand.

But leading from behind is also a description of what most of the declared and all-but-declared Republican presidential candidates were doing on the debt limit issue.

Indeed.