President Obama used his weekly radio address this week to call for lawmakers to find "common ground" on a budget deal for the remainder of this fiscal year and thereby avoid a government shutdown. Of course, Obama offered no specifics on how he would go about doing that. He just says that he is willing to agree to steeper cuts to get to an agreement, and then he shuts up and leaves the negotiations to Congress. In short, Obama is once again voting "present" like he used to do on hard issues in the Illinois legislature.
The Republicans passed a bill in the House that cuts 61 billion dollars off of the 3.7 trillion to be spent in the current year. No one could seriously call that a major cut except in Washington. Putting it in the context of a family, it would be like an average family agreeing that to cut spending for the year they will go out for dinner one time less in August and one time less in November. Oh, the horror of those cuts!
The Democrats in the Senate have made a counter offer that would cut $6 bilion in addition to the $4 billion in cuts that were agreed to earlier this week. So the two sides are $51 billion apart.
If the issue here was doing what was good for the country, it would not take long for both sides to agree. Nearly everyone (including Obama) agrees that the budget deficit is too large. Nearly everyone agrees that there needs to be a meaningful reduction in spending at the federal level. The problem, of course, is that some want to use the process of cutting spending to make political points. The Democrats have been trying to set up the Republicans as the heavies who shut down the government. Much has already been said about this, but it is not the point of this post. Rather, the issue that needs to be addressed is how to come up with a solution, with the "common ground" of which Obama speaks. And that is the problem with Mr. Obama's conduct; he offers no solution, no proposals.
A president should be able to come up with his own proposal and put it forward to get the support of his own party. Instead, Obama wants the competing forces in the Senate to flail around to try to come up with a unified Democrat position. Good luck! Other than the phony negotiating positions like the $6 billion offer currently on the table, the Republicans can see no Democrat position with which to negotiate. So instead, we have Harry Reid announce in his scratchy voice that the Democrats have a proposal for $6 billion in cuts and then we see John Boehner announce that the proposal is inadequate. No progress there. No common ground possible. No movement at all. On the other hand, were Obama to come forward with a proposal to cut $25 billion in specific programs, a number which I believe is too low, he would at least be giving the legislators something real wiht which to work. My guess is that 80% of the proposal would be agreed to by the GOP so that the gap between the two sides would be greatly reduced. At some point, there could be give and take on the rest and a final deal reached.
Unfortunately, movement of that sort required leadership by Obama. Harry Reid is not going to come forward with a real proposal for spending cuts. His goal is to score political points, not to do what is good for the country. Nancy Pelosi certainly is not going to come forward with proposed changes to the budget. She probably wants to pass the budget to find out what is in it.
the funny thing is that Obama is not talking about specific cuts in the hope that he can avoid being blamed for them, thus hurting his re-election chances. In truth, by failing in this clear test of leadership, Obama is doing more harm to his standing than could ever be done by any proposal for cuts that he would put forth. Obama will never be able to call himself a champion of fiscal responsibility without much of the audience breaking into laughter. That is not a good place for the president to be.
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