That's what outgoing White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tells ABC's Jake Tapper, anyway:

[White House Council of Economic Advisers chair] Goolsbee said a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause “a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008…This is not a game. The debt ceiling is not something to toy with.”Four year ago, however, then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., voted the exact way President Obama is now cautioning senators not to do.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said on March 16, 2006. “Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership . Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit.” Asked about that quote – and vote -- today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that it was important that “based on the outcome of that vote…the full faith and credit was not in doubt.”Then-Sen. Obama used the vote “to make a point about needing to get serious about fiscal discipline….His vote was not necessarily needed on that.”

So in other words, Obama's speechifying about the need for fiscal responsibilityu back in 2006 was all self-serving bluster. (I might be generalizing a bit.) In any event, be sure and read yesterday's Examiner editorial on why the GOP is right to make a big issue out of raising the debt ceiling.