It’s fun having a former Democratic president who feels free to not sing from the current administration’s hymnal. Yahoo! News (is there such a thing?) reports:

President Barack Obama will not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, even temporarily, past their Jan. 1 expiration, the White House said Wednesday as it coped with the fallout from comments by former President Bill Clinton.

Asked whether that applied to a short-term extension, Carney did not hide his irritation: “He will not—could I be more clear?—he will not support extension of the upper-income Bush tax cuts.”

Carney’s forceful declaration came after delighted Republicans seized on Clinton’s remarks in an interview with CNBC in which he seemed to suggest that the Bush tax cuts, set to expire at the end of this year, be temporarily extended, which would be a sharp break from Obama. “They will probably have to put everything off until early next year,” Clinton told CNBC. “That’s probably the best thing to do right now. But the Republicans don’t want to do that unless he agrees to extend the tax cuts permanently, including for upper-income people, and I don’t think the president should do that.”

Carney also bristled when asked about Clinton’s comment during a wide-ranging interview with CNBC that “there’s a recession”—which is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. “You can cherry-pick the words that he said,” the spokesman said.

But Clinton “also referred to the current expansion. We understand—you know, you work for a news service that does a lot of economic analysis—expansion means economic growth, it is the opposite of recession,” Carney said. …

“Extending all of the current tax rates for at least a year is really important if we’re going to help job creators gain a little more confidence and put Americans back to work. Even Bill Clinton came out for it—before he was against it,” [Speaker of the House John] Boehner told reporters.

I thought it was about the 1 Percent; now it’s the 2 Percent who are the Obama administration’s latest bad guys. This isn’t surprising, of course, since the administration’s definition of “millionaire” is a family with $250,000 in income.

One reason why Obama’s spokesflack bristled about the term “recession” is that while the economy may be in “expansion” by the economists’ definition, not many people probably think the economy is growing, thanks to job numbers and other signs of less-than-robust economic growth. Clinton presided over an economy that comparatively would be doing laps around the current economy. And if a majority of voters think the economy isn’t growing, even if it is technically growing, that will make Carney, among others, unemployed come next Jan. 20.

There’s a way to fix all this. That way is to vote correctly Nov. 6.