While most of Washington is consumed with the debate over national health care, the Obama White House is getting ready for the next fight. January will bring with it a pitched battle over federal spending, and President Obama, who has presided over a tripling of the budget deficit in just his first year in office, is planning to cast himself in the unlikely role of deficit hawk.
Late in the week, the White House began leaking word that Obama will make cutting the deficit a major theme of his 2010 State of the Union address, and the Office of Management and Budget will direct federal agencies to freeze, or even cut, their budgets.
The move is a result of the White House’s realization that runaway federal spending is one of the main issues troubling independent voters, who are now abandoning the Democratic party in droves. A recent Gallup poll found that when it comes to choosing candidates for next year’s congressional elections, independents favor Republicans over Democrats by a whopping 52 percent to 30 percent margin. Last July, that margin was just one percent, which means there has been a dramatic move away from Democrats in the last six months.
So the party’s leaders are ready to try something new. “As soon as health care reform is over, [Obama] needs to pivot hard to becoming a deficit and spending hawk and a jobs creator,” says a Democratic strategist who asked that his name not be used. “He should say, ‘We did the stimulus because the world would have collapsed if we didn’t. We did health care because it’s something that needed to be done for working families and will reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years. And now, we’re going to become absolute tyrants on spending, and that means I’m going to be vetoing things.'”
That strategy is likely to be met with widespread derision from Republicans. After all, Obama has presided over the stimulus, the bailouts, the big Democratic budget, the House cap-and-trade vote, health care reform, and finally, a tripling of the already-high federal deficit. Can the president now plausibly position himself as a spending hawk?
“Their principle failure is that they have allowed themselves to be defined as government interventioners and huge spenders,” the strategist says. “If he becomes the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending, he’s going to get destroyed in 2012.”
The problem, of course, is that a number of independent voters — and of course all Republicans — already view Obama as the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending. To reverse that image, the strategist believes, Obama will have to use the bully pulpit to pound home the deficit reduction message every day. But the president also needs to pick a high-profile fight with the big spenders in his own party. A few strategic vetoes, the strategist believes, and Obama can successfully recast himself as the guardian of taxpayer dollars.
Or at least that’s the plan.
