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President Barack Obama has settled on an unhelpful new explanation for his failure to restore jobs: A surplus of suffocating regulations.

In an op-ed published in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the president decries how regulations have sometimes "gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business -- burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs."

Obama's words are nothing short of a public disservice. Having failed to marshal an economic program sufficiently muscular to restore vigor to a still-lean economy, the president will not even talk straight about how we got here, instead adding confusion to the narrative that will surely embolden industries hoping to write rules in their favor.

It wasn't too many regulations that trashed the economy. It was not enough rules -- a deficit that owes in large part to the efforts of many of the people Obama has leaned on in putting together his economic policies.

Obama during his transition and remains a conspicuous influence at his Treasury Department, persuaded President Bill Clinton to roll back regulations on derivatives, the complex investments at the center of the financial crisis of 2008. Rubin's protégé, Larry Summers -- who recently left the White House, where he oversaw Obama's economic policy -- aided in that effort. Summers and Rubin both played key roles in dismantling the Depression-era walls between Wall Street trading and ordinary banking.

Obama has opted for a misleading storyline in pursuit of new allies. A few weeks ago, grasping for a way to prove his sincerity on the goal of cutting the federal budget deficit, he announced pay cuts for federal bureaucrats. This, too, was a brazen bit of pandering, because federal salaries barely amount to a rounding error compared to the items that are a real drain on federal funds -- the military, social security, Medicare. (And never mind that the president soon cut a deal with Republicans that added $900 billion to the deficit to extend tax cuts for wealthy Americans.)

Republicans, that government spending is to blame for the nation's troubles. And that simply made it harder to do what is ultimately required to put a good-sized dent in our troubles: spend more money now, on the right things -- large-scale infrastructure projects to put people back to work; and research to help enable fresh innovation that can nurture new businesses and industries that will produce paychecks. In short, invest in generating economic growth now to produce the funds needed to pay down the debt later.

Instead, Obama opted for short-term political expediency -- look tough on the deficit by blaming fat bureaucrats -- while amplifying the wrong-headed idea that reckless government spending is the problem.