Obama Press Conference Question

I've been reading a lot of blogs today and no one has mentioned what I thought was one of the biggest moments in last night's presser:

"And there's an interesting reason why some of these critics haven't put out their own budget. We haven't seen an alternative budget out of them. And the reason is because they know that in fact the biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health care costs that we've got out here that we're going to have to tackle, and that if we don't deal with some of the structural problems in our deficit, ones that were here long before I got here, then we're going to continue to see some of the problems in those out-years."

It's a totally valid point, but it was a political gamble. He just gave the Republicans an opening. If they can put together an alternative budget that still address some of the issues ahead of us but that comes in with even a moderately lower deficit than Obama's budget (a bar that he has admittedly already set pretty high), then they'll be the winners in this political tet a tet and his first 100 days will be viewed as undeniably negative (whether wrongly or rightly).

I have to figure that the certainly with which he made the statment is real and he's reasonably sure that he's right, but it sure did feel like a West Wing moment where the staff all calls each other saying, "Are you watching this?" while the congressional Republicans stand on the steps of Congress  dealing the administration a body blow (which they'll, of course, solve after the next commercial break so the episode can end with CJ's feet on her desk, smoking a preverbial cigar).

Comments

[Jack Diederich]

I hadn't checked back in months, glad to see you are posting again - even if sporadically.

Why haven't the Republicans proposed a comprehensive alternative budget? Because politically they don't have to. As the Dems demonstrated it is enough to oppose whomever the public thinks is in charge (a majority of registered Dems thought the Reps controlled both houses of congress in 2008!). Unfortunately "keep your head down and let the other guy take his lumps" is a decent strategy - the Dems rode it to victory in both 2006 and 2008.

I'm guessing this was the presser that made me write a post on Obama the Aspirational. All his policies seem to be based on the idea that just wanting the right things for the right reasons will guarantee success. The take away quote is "Obama hasn't shown a hint that he thinks any policy he likes includes tradeoffs." Everything will just be peachy if we do it hard enough.

As for healthcare in particular, conservative think tanks (if not Republicans in office) have been putting forward viable solutions for more than a decade. Break the WWII bond between employer and insurance. Tax private insurance at the the same rate as employer provided insurance. For extra hilarity Obama has jumped on this train after running ads against McCain for favoring it; the difference is that McCain pledged to give self-insurers the same tax break whereas Obama now wants to tax employer provided benefits.

I didn't like McCain (and didn't vote for him) because he publicly projected that everyone that didn't like him was an ass. I don't like Obama because he publicly projects that wanting things to be so is the same thing as making them so. I think McCain took the wrong side on most policy arguments but Obama doesn't even try to make policy arguments - he states desired outcomes and then grins charmingly.