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Politico...
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President Obama on deficit
By Glenn Thrush, Carrie Budoff Brown & David Nather
4/12/11
When it comes to deficit reduction and entitlement reform, President
Barack Obama has been a master of mixed signals, his critics say.
As a candidate, Obama promised to deal with the exploding deficit – so
committed to tackling the underlying issue of entitlement reform that
he told the Washington Post he’d make the “hard decisions… under my
watch” shortly before his inauguration almost 27 months ago.
But as president, such high-minded goals have run headlong into a
tanking economy and more mundane political imperatives, like
positioning himself for his 2012 re-election campaign.
He set up a blue-ribbon deficit commission last year – even promised
its report wouldn’t gather dust on the shelves – then promptly
distanced himself from it. His State of the Union speech mentioned debt
reduction, but focused on stimulating job growth and funneling new
funding to education, infrastructure development and green energy
projects. And he adopted a political strategy that seemed to be based
on Republicans making the first move on presenting a plan for the
deficit.
That’s all changed. Last week’s release of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s
controversial plan to privatize Medicare and a looming vote to raise
the debt limit has forced the White House to unveil its own plan in a
speech planned for George Washington University Wednesday afternoon.
“The goal here,” said a senior Democratic operative, speaking of
Obama’s address, “is to start dealing with the entitlement crisis, and
get credit for doing so, without getting ripped apart like Paul Ryan
has.”
White House aides say Obama genuinely cares about the deficit: “The
president, through his actions both in the first two years in office…
has shown that he is committed to deficit reduction,” White House press
secretary Jay Carney said on Monday, citing Medicare and Medicaid
savings in Obama’s health reform law.
Until recently, however, Obama had been comfortable letting House
Republicans and a bipartisan group of six senators take the lead on
entitlement reform, recognizing that any misstep could be cast as an
attack on the cherished Medicare and Social Security benefits to
middle-income seniors – a potential political disaster.
But the GOP has succeeded in focusing the debate, at least in
Washington, on deficit reduction; And House Speaker John Boehner
(R-Ohio), fresh off of extracting $38.5 billion in cuts from the 2011
budget, has promised to make approval of a hike in the national debt
ceiling conditional on new cuts.
A senior administration official told POLITICO that Obama’s speech
would break new ground, and not simply serve as a forum for Obama to
restate his previous arguments for addressing the deficit.
But the expectations aren’t high for a highly-specific proposal, likely
to be more a white paper than a spreadsheet.
Even so, Obama’s aides are acutely aware of the danger if they are
perceived as cutting too much from the entitlements at the heart of the
Democratic Party’s’s social-safety-net mandate.
Read the rest of the article with links at Politico
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