Skeptic Project

Senior congressional Democrats were plenty nervous on the eve of President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget presentation, fretting that Obama would suddenly gain his nerve and decide to take on the issue that editorial pages ceaselessly debate but elected officials are wary to touch — entitlement reform.

They needn’t have worried. White House officials assured their friends on the Hill that Obama wouldn’t broach the subject, Democrats told POLITICO, and on Monday when he presented his budget the president conspicuously avoided addressing entitlements, despite citing them as the country’s major fiscal problem.

Obama’s decision to avoid entitlements was instantly deemed as irresponsible. Progressive blogger Andrew Sullivan interpreted the message as “screw you, suckers” to future generations. The usually Obama-friendly Washington Post editorial page pithily described him as “Punter-in-Chief.” Republicans expressed outrage.

But for Hill Democrats — so often at odds with Obama for the past two years — this omission was no sin. It was a gift, in their view, the setting of a political trap for a Republican Party divided between conservatives pushing for major changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and a GOP leadership wary of the political peril of tinkering with Americans’ retirement security.

With Obama refusing to offer his own plan for entitlements, congressional Republicans — as the president noted — rushed in to fill the vacuum.

“I was glad to see yesterday Republican leaders say, ‘How come you didn’t talk about entitlements?’” said Obama at his news conference Tuesday, repeatedly rebuffing reporters’ attempts to get him to offer his own entitlement reforms. “I think that’s progress.”

And, in fact, Republican leaders have ruefully agreed to unveil their own list of “significant, not around-the-edges” reforms, according to a GOP aide.

“They are suckers,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide of the House GOP plans to release the first detailed proposals to reduce entitlement spending. “They have painted themselves into a corner.”

Under pressure from about 100 conservatives to tackle the issue — possibly through a new privatization plan that was part of the party’s midterm blueprint — the GOP leadership knows it is taking the first bite of a wormy political apple.

“None of the options polls well,” lamented one Republican insider.

What Hill Democrats see in the current debate is the possibility of a replay of the 2006 fight over George W. Bush’s plan to privatize social security, a move that spooked voters and helped fuel big Democratic gains in the midterms that year.

Democrats are likely to portray whatever the GOP produces as the Son of Privatization, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) previewed that strategy Tuesday night, saying the Republicans' “idea of entitlement reform will be privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher system.”

At his press conference to sell the budget, Obama cast his decision to dodge entitlement reforms as a form of leadership, saying it would have been counterproductive to float his plan past the waiting cannons of a GOP-controlled House, likely to blast away at anything he suggests, especially tax increases.

When asked whether he was abrogating his responsibility to lead, Obama replied, “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first. This is a matter of … ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49613.html