POLITICO: Obama’s Debt Problem. “The staggering national debt — up about 60 percent from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 — is the single biggest blemish on Obama’s record. . . . Obama has long emphasized Bush’s role in digging the immense hole. But he owns it now, and it’s a significant political liability as he girds for a fast-approaching brawl with the GOP over how to deal with converging deadlines of a new debt ceiling fight and the need to come up with $1 trillion in deficit reduction mandated by the so-called ‘sequester.'”

You can blame Bush all you want, and Obama likes to talk about “two wars on the credit card,” but this chart illustrates that things were actually improving until we got a Democratic Congress in 2007, and got worse when we elected Obama.