Obama scolds GOP as debt talks break down: ‘Where’s the leadership?’

In an unusual display of emotion, President Obama angrily responded to House Speaker John A. Boehner’s abrupt withdrawal from talks on a debt ceiling increase, and summoned congressional leaders to the White House on Saturday for emergency talks to plot a new course before the Aug. 2 deadline.

“We have run out of time,” the president said in a hastily-called news briefing, just moments after Boehner informed him of his decision.

On Thursday, Obama and Boehner appeared to be closing in on a deal that would have raised the debt ceiling through 2013, combined with spending cuts and entitlement reforms to achieve $3 trillion in deficit reduction.

But talks apparently broke down in a dispute over taxes. Obama, prodded by Democrats, insisted that any deal include new revenues in addition to spending cuts.

“This was an extraordinarily fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue,” Obama said. “It is hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal.”

Boehner told his Republican colleagues the White House was “simply not serious about ending the spending binge that is destroying jobs and endangering our children’s future.” A deal was “never really close,” he wrote late Friday.

The two leaders had built a cordial relationship during both the budget agreement in April and the weeks-long debt ceiling talks.

But Obama chided the Ohio Republican, saying that at times Friday he could not even get a phone call returned.

“I’ve been left at the altar now a couple of times,” he said. “And I think that one of the questions that the Republican Party’s going to have to ask itself is, can they say yes to anything?”

Framing the issue in political terms, he said Democrats have “shown ourselves willing to do the tough stuff, on an issue that Republicans ran on.”

“So far I have not seen the capacity of the House Republicans in particular to make those tough decisions. And so then the question becomes, where’s the leadership, or alternatively, how serious are you actually about debt and deficit reduction, or do you simply want it as a campaign ploy going into the next elections?”

Obama called the congressional leadership from both parties to the White House at 11 a.m. Saturday. Neither the House or Senate was due to be in session.

With the likelihood of a significant deal now likely scuttled, Obama said he would be willing to accept a “clean” debt ceiling increase “if they tell me that’s the best they can do.”

The parties could turn back to a legislative maneuver outlined by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that had been seen as a fail-safe option.

“It’s time now for the debate to move out of a room in the White House and on to the House and Senate floors where we can debate the best approach to reducing the nation’s unsustainable debt,” McConnell said in a statement.