Obama surrenders his agenda
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
March 25, 2009
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| President Barack Obama speaks to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 23, 2009. From left are, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the president. (AP) |
At his news conference Tuesday night, President Obama stressed the four most important goals he hopes to accomplish this year: health care reform, energy legislation, education reform, and deficit reduction. But by the end of the hour-long session with the White House press corps, Obama had retreated on three of the four. On energy, he defined progress so far down that virtually any action would satisfy his request to Congress; on health care, he was vague and noncommittal; and on the deficit, he insisted against widespread skepticism that he can reduce the deficit despite a budget that projects a tripling of the national debt in the next decade.
The president's biggest surrender was on energy. Powerful Senate Democrats, led by Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, have essentially vetoed Obama's cap-and-trade proposal as unrealistic in this year of economic crisis. At the White House Tuesday night, Obama in effect conceded that his plan, if enacted, could cause "huge spikes in electricity prices." Tacitly admitting that his proposal has little or no chance on Capitol Hill, he said, "When it comes to cap-and-trade, the broader principle is that we've got to move to a new energy era. And that means moving away from polluting energy sources towards cleaner energy sources." Obama made no demands about how that might be done, signaling that his cap-and-trade proposal is very likely dead.
On health care, Obama's budget included a $634 billion place holder for a to-be-announced reform proposal. In the Senate, top Democrats have not only not signed on to that number, they haven't signed on to any number at all. And some party leaders also oppose the idea of using the "reconciliation" process to push through a health care proposal with fewer than the 60 votes required to defeat a filibuster. If those views prevail, Obama's health care proposal could end up being smaller than first proposed, and not guaranteed to pass even in reduced form. On Tuesday night, Obama would only say that "I expect…serious efforts at health care reform."
On the deficit, Obama declared that "we've got to start driving our deficit numbers down," but he is going up against new projections from the Congressional Budget Office that show him adding $9.3 trillion to the national debt in coming years -- $2.3 trillion more than the White House had originally predicted. While Obama argued that "we drive down the deficit over the first five years of our budget," the fact is that, even when one excludes 2009, deficits projected for later years in the Obama budget are proportionately larger than any since World War II. Rattled by that $2.3 trillion figure from the CBO, lawmakers of both parties are searching for ways to scale back Obama's plans. So Obama can argue that his budget reduces the deficit, but it does not appear that anyone believes him.
Finally, Obama retreated on other areas of his agenda, as well. Dumping the cap-and-trade proposal -- which Obama had predicted would bring in more than $600 billion to the Treasury -- has meant that lawmakers are scaling back plans to make permanent Obama's $400 yearly tax cut for most workers. And yet another priority piece of legislation, the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, while not on Obama's budget agenda, also appears to be dead for this year.
All of which leaves the president with a significantly scaled-back agenda from the moment he entered office 65 days ago. On Tuesday night, Obama said he "never expected, when we printed out our budget that [Congress] would simply Xerox it and vote on it." That's undoubtedly true. But he might also not have expected that Congress, especially lawmakers from his own party, would have done so much damage to his agenda so early in the game.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.
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