Our political Quote of the Day comes from Dick Polman, who in a must-read-in-full-post looks at President Barack Obama’s proposed budget which is coming under angry fire from the left and right, from some Dems and some Repubs. Polman starts out with this:
Policy and politics are typically intertwined. Case in point: President Obama’s 2012 budget blueprint, which foreshadows his 2012 re-election strategy.
Obama intends to chart a middle course – much the way Bill Clinton situated himself between the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in 1995 and 1996 – and if that requires Obama to take big hits from both the left and the right, then so be it. Obama’s goal is to capture the swing-voting independents who think that liberals don’t want to cut the budget enough, but fear that conservatives want to cut it too much. As Obama remarked this morning at a press conference, he prefers to use “a scalpel…not a machete.”
Obama’s budget, which aims to trim the deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, is predictably being savaged by both sides. Republicans (who have miraculously rediscovered fiscal conservatism after repeatedly indulging George W. Bush’s budget-busting, debt-ridden, China-borrowing big-government expansion) complain that Obama isn’t slashing enough. A GOP statement denounced his ’12 budget as “bloated.” Indeed, House Republicans are trying to set a good example. They’re seeking to de-bloat the current fiscal year budget by severely slashing food inspections, nutrition programs for pregnant women and newborns, college aid for cash-strapped grad students, and home heating assistance for the poor and elderly.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, liberals are assailing Obama as a heartless wimp who has bought into the Republican austerity narrative. He too wants to trim college aid (the popular Pell grants), just not as much as the GOP. He too wants to trim home heating assistance, just not as much as the GOP. As part of his proposed five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending, he also wants to trim community-service grants (a bit ironic, given his own stint as a community service guy).
And he ends with this:
All told, a centrist path on the budget, at a time when there are no good options and a multitude of conflicting ideological critics, seems at the moment to be a thankless task. But, in terms of the ’12 campaign, it might be the smartest political strategy. Although, admittedly, there is something less than inspiring about the prospect of Obama successfully muddling through as the nation and its economy muddle along.
Once again Polman nails it (which probably means he’ll be fire from the left and right, from some Dems and some Repubs…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.