Although we won't know until Monday the devil in the details – or actually, the details themselves of what constitutes the $38 billion plus in spending cuts that the White House and House Republicans agreed to Friday night to avert a government shutdown, it's fairly obvious who won.
House Republicans and the tea party.
It's simply a fact that until not that long ago, the White House and Democrats didn't want to cut anything else out of the 2011 fiscal year budget, which actually is already halfway thru its cycle. You might remember that after Republicans took over the House last November, they talked boldly that they wanted to take out $100 billion. They reduced that, but only because the actual fiscal year was already underway.
And as the Republicans accurately have stated in the incessant discussions on the talk shows, this argument need not have happened, if the Democrats, who controlled the House and the Senate up until last November, had voted on a budget last summer.
So on Sunday, President Obama's campaign manager in 2008 and now the political guy in the White House, David Plouffe (who replaced David Axelrod months ago), did a full Ginsberg, making appearances on four of the five major political talk shows (eschewing only CBS' Face The Nation). His job was twofold: to give praise to his guy for making sure the government wasn't shut down, but also to defend against charges from the left that the President seems to have shifted his economic objective from trying to grow the economy currently via stimulus or other measures, to going into full deficit attack mode, which Obama has previously said he would pivot to, but obviously is now being forced to by Paul Ryan and House Republicans.
On ABC's This Week, host Christiane Amanpour asked what was the spin and what was real from the White House: one day the cuts are being called horrific, but now they're historic? (quoting Harry Reid).
PLOUFFE: Well, some of the cuts were draconian, because it's not just the number. It's what composes the number. So in this budget deal, the president, Senator Reid, you know, we protected medical research, community health centers, kids on Head Start. We were not going to sign off on a deal that cut those things.
So the president was comfortable with the composition of this deal. That, again, you know, there were some tough cuts in there, things he believes in. But in these fiscal times everyone is going to have to make tough decisions.
So it was a historic deal for the American people. But here's the important thing, the president has spoken often about his plan to win the future for America economically. And what this budget does is preserve our ability to do that through education and innovation.
AMANPOUR: So many economists have said that at this particular time when you've got a fragile recovery, cuts in any way could harm that. Are you worried about this setting back the recovery?
PLOUFFE: I think if they're not careful cuts, yes, it could. And that's what the president said, listen, we can't take a machete, we have to take a scalpel, and we're going to have to cut, we're going to have to look carefully.
What you have to do is go line by line. It can't be some macro argument about big numbers. You've got to look at the details and make a judgment on each one, in terms of the impact on people, in terms of the impact on the economy.
And that's the approach of the president, we carefully approached it so that we can cut spending, we can reduce the deficit in the short and long term, but without jeopardizing our economic growth and without jeopardizing those things like education and innovation.
Just as significantly, Plouffe offered up news that the President will do what he has been criticized for not doing until now (and this is where Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan does deserve credit) – getting serious about entitlement reform on Medicaid and Medicare, issues that he's punted on so far, and which most analysts said he didn't really want to address until after 2012, if he were to be re-elected. Plouffe said this to Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace (and at the end took a shot at Fox viewers).
PLOUFFE: Well, he'll lay out his approach this week in terms of the scale of debt reduction he thinks the country needs so we can grow economically and win the future, a balanced approach. Obviously, we need to look at all corners of government. As he said previously, his health care law is $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next two decades, but we have to do more there.
We have to look at more spending here, carefully. As he said, we have to use a scalpel not a machete. And, obviously, this is a distinction with the congressional Republican plan that was announced this week.
That plan would give the average millionaire $200,000 in tax cuts, but ask a lot more of senior citizens. It would double their health care cost, $6,000 a year down the road. Cut education, cut energy investment at a time of record gas prices.
So, we're going to have a big debate. But what's clear on deficit reduction, like anything in Washington, if we're going to make any progress together, whether it's in education reform, job creation, deficit reduction, the parties are going to have to come together to find common ground. And that's what happened this week — just as it did in December when the parties came together with the president's leadership to cut taxes for everybody in America.
WALLACE: Let me ask you a couple of specifics. Will the president address entitlements which he did not do in his 2012 budget, specifically what to do about Medicare and Medicaid?
PLOUFFE: Well, first, on the 2012 budget, that would be $1 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade and lowest level of domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower. And he said it in the State of the Union, that was just a start. We're going to have to do more.
So, as I said, we've already — on health care, over $1 trillion. Actually, the congressional Republican plan actually preserves the Medicare spending. So, the president says we have to do more. He's going to lay out his cuts about that (ph).
On Social Security, there wasn't anything really in the congressional plan on that. What the president is going to say is he does not think Social Security is a chief contributor our deficit situation in the short-term. But as we're having these debates, as we're looking at the federal budget and all these programs, if there's a way to preserve Social Security, we should really strive to do that. So, I think there's going to be discussions about the Social Security in a way that doesn't slash benefits.
Plouffe also rubbed the sensitivities of Wallace and conservatives on the blogosphere when he said that "compromise" shouldn't be viewed as a dirty word, "Even with a lot of your viewers, it shouldn't be."
On CNN, Illinois Senator Dick Durban denied that the President capitulated, saying, "We fought to protect early childhood education, Pell Grants…medical research….we won the battle on this, but we joined the Republicans on cutting spending."
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.