Does He Know It’s DOA?
- 03.25.2009 - 9:40 AMAs Politico recounted:
President Barack Obama used a prime-time news conference Tuesday to try to convince Americans that his budget and policy prescriptions are exactly what’s needed to get nation’s economy back on track, despite criticism from both parties in Congress.
“This budget is inseparable from this recovery,” Obama insisted. “It is what lays the foundation for a secure and lasting prosperity.”
In this and other utterances his prime-time press conference seemed to take on the air of a Kabuki performance. His budget is going nowhere in its current form — and not because of Republicans. Red state Democrats, including Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, are taking a meat axe to his spending plans. Yet he proceeded to argue his case, seemingly oblivious to the political realities overtaking his agenda.
At times his argument seems to defy reality. The Washington Post editors noticed too:
When Mr. Obama ticked off his “bottom line,” he included “serious efforts to reduce our budget deficit,” but the efforts in his budget are not serious enough. Cutting the deficit in half is an unimpressive promise given the state of the deficit; the more important question is getting deficits down to a sustainable level. Instead, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Obama’s budget envisions spending over 23 percent of gross domestic product almost every year, while collecting less than 19 percent of GDP in taxes. If his priorities are important enough to spend money on, the president owes Congress and the country a vision of how he would generate sufficient revenue to meet the needs.
Reality intruded nevertheless. He conceded the jig may be up for cap-and-trade and seemed largely unattached to his own middle-class tax cut. It’s hard to tell how much he believes his own spin, how much he is just trying to get away with, and how aware he is that his budget has landed with a thud on Capitol Hill.
Does he actually believe his budget is going to cut the deficit in half? Is he serious that a gargantuan increase in spending and debt is part and parcel of our recovery? Let’s hope not. It would be unnerving to think the president is that unaware of fiscal and political realities. But if he does read the tea leaves and see that the final product will bear little resemblance to his original proposal, it’s hard to understand what he thought he was accomplishing last night.
As Andrew Malcolm points out, if he’s simply going to robotically repeat his sales pitch without saying much of anything of new value, then ”the broadcast networks may well leave it to cable and C-SPAN in order to stimulate their own economies.” It is not really “news” to watch the president stubbornly evade reality, and it’s not as if we haven’t seen enough of him lately. (Tina Brown had it right when she noted that he is “strangely tone-deaf to the risk of overexposure.”) Perhaps when he defies liberal conventional wisdom, abandons glib condescension on meaty ethical issues (e.g. stem cells), or evidences some candor on the budget, he could call another one. That‘d make news.
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