For a cool $2,500, you can attend a private fundraiser at the Davis Islands home of former Tampa City Council member Linda Saul-Sena and her husband Mark beginning at six p.m.
If you can't afford that, Plouffe (as well as the Deputy National Field Director for the Obama 2012 campaign, Marlon Marshall will appear at Mangrove's on Howard Avenue in South Tampa at another event beginning at 7 p.m. ($200 will get you into that event). VIP tickets will go for $1,000, and those under 44 years of age can get in with a $44 contribution. (That event is to be linked by satellite to Chicago, where the President will be celebrating his birthday eve).
Plouffe represented the administration on both NBC's Meet The Press and ABC's This Week shows on Sunday morning, where he was hammered by those shows moderators on the potential plan that could lead to a resolution on raising the debt ceiling, but without any increases in revenues (i.e., taxes) now, or anytime soon.
On MTP, Plouffe was left to explain to host David Gregory the fact that regardless of how the ultimate vote will go down - the parameters of the deal worked out between Senator Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell would go down, this deal will not be "balanced" as President Obama had said was necessary in his nationally televised address last Monday night - a balance of some sort of revenue enhancers to go with all of the spending cuts that are surely coming:
MR. GREGORY: There's no tax increases in this.
MR. PLOUFFE: But...
MR. GREGORY: You—the president said it had to have tax increases, it must—had to be balanced.
MR. PLOUFFE: The committee—yeah.
MR. GREGORY: That's not what's in this deal.
MR. PLOUFFE: Well, listen, this committee's going to be charged with coming up with additional deficit reduction. There's no way to do it without smart entitlement reform and tax reform.
MR. GREGORY: So you only get to do potential tax increases as part of a second stage of spending cuts that a committee has to agree to?
MR. PLOUFFE: Well, the first stage—it's clear in this first stage what we're going to get is an extension of the debt ceiling...
MR. GREGORY: Right.
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MR. PLOUFFE: ...you're going to get that first set of spending cuts over $1 trillion, and then you're going to get this committee that's going to be charged with reporting out, hopefully, a balanced deficit reduction plan.
MR. GREGORY: Well, what is healthy about this debate? I mean, you talk about another supercommittee. Seventeen months ago the president convened a debt commission, the proposals, recommendations from which were not acted on by the president or Congress. Now you're talking about another committee. Nobody's yet making the hard choices about two-thirds of the budget, which is entitlement spending. So what's healthy about this debate?
MR. PLOUFFE: Well, it's certainly not been a healthy debate in, in the short-term. I think the American people are sitting back and saying, you know, "I'm going through tough things in my life, and these folks are sitting there arguing with each other, unwilling to compromise, do tough things." Particularly the House Republicans this week. But I would say this. The president laid out several months ago a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. What we were striving to do with the speaker of the House was a, a big deficit reduction package that wouldn't have a supercommittee, we would have done it right now. That wasn't possible. The speaker of the House, pulled by the right wing of his party, walked away from that. But the president's going to be committed over these next few months, as I—and I think members of Congress needs to be as well, that we need to finish the job here. And the way they're going to finish that job is to have a balanced deficit reduction package that doesn't harm the economy.
Of course, details of any plan are pretty sparse as write this early Sunday afternoon.
