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Politico...
White House struggles
to lead on spending
By Glenn Thrush & Carrie Budoff Brown
3/10/11
The budget debate has been galloping away from Democrats since the
passage of a two-week spending bill — and President Barack Obama tried
to grab back the reins on Wednesday.
The White House has tried to keep its distance from Senate and House
negotiators, fearing being dragged into another partisan food fight
after the bipartisan triumph of the December lame-duck session. But
White House officials now see the political initiative they enjoyed
just weeks ago slipping away, amid divisions among Senate Democrats and
an emerging GOP strategy of dragging Obama into an endless string of
stopgap spending measures that could have long-term drawbacks for the
White House.
That has Democrats — as “Where’s the president?” becomes a GOP rallying
cry — hankering to negotiate a long-term budget deal as quickly as
feasible, even if it means having to confront, however superficially,
the third-rail issue of entitlement reform.
“For Republicans, it’s phenomenal to do all these little deals because
it makes them look like they are actually doing something when they are
really doing nothing,” said an administration official, who predicted
passage of a three-week extension before the looming March 18 deadline
to keep the government running.
“They would like nothing better than to make us look like tax-and-spend
liberals ... and the longer they can drag this out, the better,” the
official added.
Obama’s team — which had anticipated a messy internal GOP fight between
mainstream Republicans and tea party faithful — now worry that the
contours of a winning GOP strategy on the budget is coming into focus:
a series of small deals, with escalating cuts that force the president
to defend his pet social and development programs at a time when he had
hoped to position himself as a fiscal hawk.
Read the full story at Politico
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