Get-to-work Obama suddenly uninterested in work

Old and busted: Leading leaders and the leadership they display by meeting with leaders. New hotness: The worthlessness of leaders meeting leaders. Yesterday, Barack Obama insisted that leadership meant meeting with opponents and getting serious about finding compromise and making a deal:

And I’ve got to say, I’m very amused when I start hearing comments about, well, the President needs to show more leadership on this. Let me tell you something. Right after we finished dealing with the government shutdown, averting a government shutdown, I called the leaders here together. I said we’ve got to get done — get this done. I put Vice President Biden in charge of a process — that, by the way, has made real progress — but these guys have met, worked through all of these issues. I met with every single caucus for an hour to an hour and a half each — Republican senators, Democratic senators; Republican House, Democratic House. I’ve met with the leaders multiple times. At a certain point, they need to do their job.

And so, this thing, which is just not on the level, where we have meetings and discussions, and we’re working through process, and when they decide they’re not happy with the fact that at some point you’ve got to make a choice, they just all step back and say, well, you know, the President needs to get this done — they need to do their job.

Now is the time to go ahead and make the tough choices. That’s why they’re called leaders. And I’ve already shown that I’m willing to make some decisions that are very tough and will give my base of voters further reason to give me a hard time. But it’s got to be done.

And so there’s no point in procrastinating. There’s no point in putting it off. We’ve got to get this done. And if by the end of this week, we have not seen substantial progress, then I think members of Congress need to understand we are going to start having to cancel things and stay here until we get it done.

So what is Obama’s idea of leadership? Declaring himself uninterested in such mundane matters as budget negotiations:

The White House effectively turned down an invitation by Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell for President Barack Obama to visit his members on Capitol Hill on Thursday to discuss raising the debt limit.

Jay Carney told the media earlier today that McConnell’s invitation was “not a conversation worth having.” Sounds a lot like Obama’s own press conference. It also highlights a particularly Democratic approach to bipartisanship, which is usually defined as Republicans agreeing to Democratic demands, which is more or less how Obama defined the supposedly bipartisan process that produced ObamaCare and Porkulus, both of which were written by Democrats without Republican input.

Obama tried painting himself as the “adult in the room” yesterday, according to sources at the White House. Don’t you have to actually be in the room to qualify as such?