Mr. President, a scalpel won’t do the job

Obama is unprepared to make the deep cuts fiscal necessity requires

Illustration: Obama cuts by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

House Speaker John A. Boehner extracted more budget concessions from President Obama and the Democrats than was at first evident when the deal was announced last week.

He squeezed not only nearly $40 billion out of this fiscal year’s remaining budget but also another $40 billion in increases Mr. Obama had proposed for agency budgets that Congress never agreed to accept.

The deal Mr. Boehner negotiated for fiscal 2011 means that spending this year will be $78.5 billion less than what Mr. Obama requested last year from the Democratic-run Congress, which failed to enact any budget. In one key respect, Mr. Boehner and the Republicans did what the Democrats irresponsibly refused to do: cut spending.

While these sums pale in the face of a $3.7 trillion annual budget that is running a record $1.6 trillion deficit and $14 trillion in debt, the GOP’s interim victory has thrown Mr. Obama and the Democrats on the defensive as they enter a critical two-year presidential election cycle with Mr. Obama’s job-approval scores falling dangerously into the mid-40s and 23 Senate Democrats - a number of whom are vulnerable - up for re-election next year.

Mr. Obama, who proudly called Mr. Boehner’s budget deal “the largest spending cut in our history,” is turning himself into what Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz called “a born-again budget cutter.”

In the aftermath of the deal, the White House was scrambling to reposition the president on spending and soaring debt, which their own polls show are fast turning into a Mount Everest-size political issue endangering his re-election prospects.

Suddenly, Mr. Obama was more tightly embracing the proposals of his presidential budget reform commission, which he had kept at arm’s length - speaking warmly about its provisions to scuttle a raft of tax breaks and other loopholes in exchange for lowering the corporate and individual tax rates.

He was practically sending love letters to the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who were working behind the scenes to come up with a compromise 2012 budget based on the commission’s report. Trouble is, they have not been able to reach an agreement.

“It’s pretty hard for [Mr. Obama] to hitch himself to something that doesn’t exist yet,” said Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a waste-fighting Republican member of the gang. “There’s nothing I’ve agreed to that could be announced this week,” Mr. Coburn said.

Mr. Obama is expected to lay out his latest budget plans in a major speech here Wednesday, but, as is his style, he isn’t going to get his hands dirty on any specifics. Instead, he will speak only in broad themes, his advisers said. Such is “leadership” in the age of Obama.

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