A revealing, continuing verbal tic.

It has been noted before that Obama thinks that everyone else is stupid - particularly out in the part of the country where people cling bitterly to their guns and religion - which has made for his most spectacular gaffes.  Bill Kristol noted this trope being slid into the President's speech on raising the debt ceiling:

I was struck by these sentences in President Obama’s speech:

Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.

Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up.

Consider the condescension implicit in the president’s statement—“a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.” These “people outside of Washington” are not little children being lectured on an obscure subject by a worldly adult. These people outside Washington are ... citizens. Judging by the polls, most of us have opinions about whether, and under what conditions, the debt ceiling should be raised. We don’t seem to be as ignorant as Obama thinks we are of the term or concept of a debt ceiling. But the president assumes we’ve never bothered our pretty little heads about such a thing.