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8 a.m. ET: Politicians have lost elections for raising taxes. They've lost for slashing spending. And they've lost because the economy is in recession. But how many times have they lost because the budget wasn't balanced?
We may find out next year, as the deficit is rapidly becoming the most common and, possibly, the most potent Republican charge against President Obama and his fellow Democrats. In Sunday's Washington Post, Scott Wilson reported that the White House is worried Obama's spending plans "could become a political liability that defines the 2010 midterm elections." In a much-cited piece last week, David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times that while the current fiscal mess is mostly not Obama's fault, the president "does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested." And a headline in this week's Economist says "America’s debt is Barack Obama’s biggest weakness."
But does the public care? Or rather, do voters care about the deficit more than they do about fixing the still-sputtering economy, health care, Iraq and whatever other issues have propelled Democrats to commanding victories the last two election cycles? According to Pew, worries about the deficit reached their peak in 1993 and 1994, after Ross Perot's budget-focused presidential campaign and just before Republicans captured Congress pledging to promote fiscal discipline, but such concerns have steadily shrunk in the ensuing years. As of late April, 10 percent of respondents in a CNN poll called the budget deficit "the most important issue facing the country today" while 55 percent cited the economy.
Regardless of whether the budget issue has the power to decide elections on its own, concerns about the spiralling deficit will directly affect the public's perception of Obama's biggest first-term priority -- health care. A Diageo/Hotline poll released last week found that 62 percent of respondents support "a major overhaul of the U.S. health care system," but they also believed, by a 14-point margin, that "controlling the cost" of health care was more important than "expanding coverage." If Obama's plan ends up doing the latter more than the former, it may lose vital public support. Robert Samuelson writes this morning: "It's hard to know whether President Obama's health-care 'reform' is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three." (Tell us what you really think, Robert.) His complaint is a common one -- Obama's plan is being pitched as a way to control spending but would actually "do the opposite."
Also on the health care front, Obama heads to Chicago today to give a key address to the American Medical Association. Attendees of the conference will find in the New York Times this morning a fortuitously-timed story, "Obama Open to Reining in Medical Suits." The piece says Obama believes malpractice reform "should be considered as part of any health care overhaul," an important olive branch to doctors and Republicans that may cause angst in Obama's own party if -- a big if -- he's really serious about it.
The Chicago Tribune, meanwhile, uses Obama's jaunt to the Windy City today as a hook to analyze the costs of presidential trips. The price tag for using Air Force One for the round trip "will run about $236,000," the Tribune reports, not counting the cost of the Secret Service, motorcades and other on-the-ground expenses. The numbers are interesting, though they would likely get more play if they were broken down for a trip that wasn't so obviously part of the president's official duties. For example, how much did it cost yesterday to transport Obama to Ft. Belvoir to play golf?
By
Ben Pershing
|
June 15, 2009; 8:00 AM ET
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Go to full archive for The Rundown »
Posted by: demtse | June 15, 2009 8:34 AM
The mid term elections will be hard but revolution in the streets will be even harder. So the GOP's plan is to not spend money and lay off teachers, police, firemen, astronauts, scientists, and soldiers in order to achieve a balanced budget? Since they started out with a Balanced budget handed to them by Clinton and handed Obama a record deficit they will be hard pressed to make that stick.
Posted by: mikey999 | June 15, 2009 9:33 AM
Ahhhahahaha! Ahhahhahhahahaha!
The Republicans are going to campaign on deficits?
Reagan doubled the nation's debt in his 6th year as president, exceeding the combined debt of all 40 presidents before him. Debt doesn't matter (unless a Democrat is president) the Reagan Republicans said.
Reagan, Bush, and Bush rung up $9 trillion of America's $11 trillion in debt, pre-Obama.
Republicans runing on deficits is so dishonest America will reject them further.
Posted by: chucky-el | June 15, 2009 10:04 AM
It is well established that the GOP couldn't care less about the deficit. The only reason they're bringing it up now is because Democrats are in charge. It was Dick Cheney who was quoted as saying "Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter".
They do matter, but the economic and health care crisis that Obama has inherited matter more. Nobody believed Bill Clinton could balance the budget in 1994, but he did it three years later. I'll take Obama's planning over the mewling and braying of the bunch of lying deadbeats that make up the GOP leadership.
Posted by: jheath531 | June 15, 2009 10:27 AM
my my.... this is the first time I've stumbled across this particular section of the on-line WaPo - and it turns out to be just another section uncritically parroting GOP talking points that don't hold up under logic or scrutiny or any analysis where the word "hypocrisy" may apply.
It really does seem like this paper is going out of its way to give its readers no reason to keep coming back.
Posted by: hohandy1 | June 15, 2009 10:45 AM
What's with this Obama guy? Playing golf? Not only is that a dishonor to the troops but it's also a tremendous break from his worthy and exalted memo-ignoring torture authorizing predecessor.
After all, how can Obama play golf when Obama's still got to figure out how to keep our troops from getting blown up for no reason as he tries to get us out of the country Bush invaded based on cooked 'intel' and how to find OBL in Afghanistan or Pakistan after Bush let OBL 'escape' from Tora Bora.
Why can't Obama just set up a staged play 'ranch' near Waco, get the GAO to requisition him an electric chain saw and spend a year and half there watching tumbleweeds go by transiting from DC to the staged play 'ranch' on Air Force One? Now that's a great way to spend tax dollars. After Obama's terms finish, he could just ditch the staged play 'ranch' asap and move to a toney neighborhood in Dallas and be chums with cowboy W.
Posted by: Patriot3 | June 15, 2009 11:09 AM
Congress cannot repeal the law of supply and demand, no matter who's writing the statutes. Too much money supply creates inflation; too little creates deflation. Whether or not former administrations left a deficit, a surplus or broke even is irrelevant to NOW; what we are NOW doing is printing money endlessly to paper over a real need to restructure poor investments made over generations. The business cycle of investment, expansion, overbuilding, recession and restructuring followed by new investment is fairly easy to understand; it's not always easy to take, especially when it's YOUR job that's getting "restructured". But printing up new trillions of dollars to "prevent" or "cure" a recession won't do that; it will only postpone the day of reckoning a while, and add to the mountain of debt that is already extant. When you're stuck in a hole, quit digging! I don't want ANYONE, Republican or Democrat, to sell my children into economic slavery for their lifetimes so that unpreventable economic effects can hit later instead of sooner. My children's children should not be born into debt they had no say in incurring; and any politician who votes to enslave my children will find out how that plays in Peoria.
Posted by: Wanderer13 | June 15, 2009 11:49 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
The GOP has no ground on which the criticize Obama's domestic policy. Their problem is the "doctrine of unclean hands"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_hands