[Vision2020] Republicans: Debt will bring Barack Obama down

[Chasuk]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23545.html

By:  Manu Raju
June 9, 2009 06:25 PM EST

Republicans on Capitol Hill think they’ve finally found Barack Obama’s
Achilles’ heel: rising public concern about government spending and
the federal deficit.

While Obama’s overall job-approval ratings are up over the past month,
a Gallup Poll out this week has a 51 percent majority of Americans
disapproving of the president’s efforts to control federal spending
and a slim 48 percent to 46 percent disapproving of his handling of
the federal deficit.

Those are the only areas where Obama has negative approval ratings —
Americans approve, by double-digit margins, the way Obama is handling
his overall job, foreign affairs, terrorism, the Middle East and North
Korea. But the GOP will take what it can get.

“The president is still popular, but his policies are catching up with
him,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, who, as the No. 3
Republican in the Senate, is in charge of messaging for his
conference. “When that happens, it helps us make our points.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the head of the National Republican
Senatorial Committee, told POLITICO that GOP candidates in 2010 will
almost certainly use the deficit to argue that Democrats own a
Washington mess.

“This was not an inherited situation. This was a matter entirely of
this administration’s and this Democratic leadership’s making,” Cornyn
said. “In large part, I believe, 2010 will be a referendum on their
performance.”

When President George W. Bush left office, he left behind a $10.6
trillion national debt, which refers to the cumulative amount of money
the government owes. That number now stands at $11.4 trillion,
according to the Treasury Department.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual deficit will
grow to $984 billion for the first eight months of the current fiscal
year, compared with a $319 billion shortfall for the same time period
last year. In 2012, under Obama’s budget, the CBO estimates that the
deficit will fall to $658 billion.

Democrats argue that Bush left them with an economic mess and two
wars, and they say that the country needs to spend money to get its
way out of financial calamity. Eventually, they say, the government
will see increased tax revenues as the economy improves, and it will
be repaid by the banks and auto companies that have secured massive
loans to stay afloat.
The Politico 44 Story Widget Requires Adobe Flash Player.


Two members of Democratic leadership — Washington Sen. Patty Murray
and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer — said they’re not worried about
Obama’s poll numbers over the deficit.

“The reason we are where we are is because of a war that was spent off
budget for many years when nobody talked about the deficit — and put
us where we are today,” Murray said. “We are working our way out of
this, and I think in the most reasonable way we can.”

At the White House on Tuesday, Obama promised to cut the deficit in
half in four years and decried “the reckless fiscal policies of the
past.” He laid out legislative plans to restore more fiscally
restrictive budgeting by enacting into law so-called pay-go rules,
which would require that new revenues or spending cuts accompany any
new program that would otherwise add to the deficit.

“We are confronting the worst recession this country has faced in
generations,” Obama said. “This has required extraordinary investments
in the short term. Another imperative is addressing long-deferred
priorities — health care, energy, education — which threaten the
American economy and the well-being of American families. We have
begun to tackle these problems as well.”

But some of Obama’s fellow Democrats have been wary of domestic
initiatives that could drive up the deficit. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a
conservative Democrat from Louisiana, said Tuesday that she would
support a private-sector model with “significant protections for
consumers” for health care — but not a public option run by the
government.

“If we would take that step, not only would we get health care but we
would save money,” Landrieu said of her preferred approach. “So that
goes to the positive side of deficit reduction, not the negative.”

Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the Senate’s most conservative
Democrats, senses a risk for his party on the deficit issue.

“I do believe that we need to make every effort to get our hands
around it and not let it just be on auto-pilot; then the American
people will understand that, and that will eliminate part of the
political risk,” Nelson said. “But if it appears that there is not a
strong focus on it and there is no sufficient effort to try to control
it, then I think it’s a major political risk.”

And the Senate Budget Committee chairman, Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), was
critical of the White House’s pay-go plan for proposing that the
budgeting process need not apply to Medicare payments to physicians,
patching the alternative minimum tax and for Bush-era tax cuts.

“While I very much favor putting statutory pay-go back on the books, I
don’t support waiving pay-go for trillions of dollars of items that I
think have to be paid for,” Conrad said Tuesday.

Republicans are eager to capitalize on such concerns, with Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) repeatedly making speeches
attacking Democrats’ spending and health care proposals — a slow-build
tactic similar to the one he employed over Obama’s proposal to close
the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Said Alexander: “We respect the president, we understand he’s popular,
but when it comes to debt, housing credits, getting government
ownership and the car companies out of Washington, D.C., a
government-run health plan, we’ve got issues — and what’s beginning to
emerge, I think, is two words: Washington takeover.”

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) cited a number of efforts under way to recoup
costs from the economic crisis but acknowledged that Democrats need to
make controlling spending part of their message.

“Part of our brand has to be, ‘We know how to spend money
effectively,’” Carper said.