The White House’s budget miscalculation
(Dennis Brack - Bloomberg News)
If President Obama does in fact endorse a deficit-reduction process centered around Simpson-Bowles tomorrow, he’ll be endorsing a plan that’s gotten the votes of Republicans Tom Coburn, Mike Crapo and Judd Gregg, not to mention Alan Simpson. This isn’t the liberal proposal. It’s not the deficit reduction plan Democrats would like to see. It’s the framework at the end of a process of compromise, not the beginning.
The danger for Obama is that in endorsing Simpson-Bowles at the beginning of a process of compromise, he makes a centrist — at best — proposal the left pole of the debate, with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget serving as the right pole. That implies an outcome similar to the shutdown negotiations, where the Democrats ended up arguing for House Speaker John Boehner’s cuts while the Republicans ended up arguing for the tea party’s cuts, and the final deal was somewhere between the two. A debate between center and right will lead to a further right outcome than a debate between left and right.
A few weeks ago, if you criticized the White House for having left a vacuum for Ryan to fill, you’d heard about the possibility of “counterpunch” strategy: Ryan would show what couldn’t work and what was not reasonable, and White House officials would show what could work and what was. Now that it looks like they’re going to call a process built atop Simpson-Bowles what could work, it is very hard to see how or why they didn’t simply endorse the deficit commission’s plan as a starting point in either the State of the Union or their 2012 budget.
The only thing that’s changed now is that Ryan’s budget is pulling the Republican Party to the right, which suggests that the final compromise will be further to the right. If the Obama administration had begun this discussion with Simpson-Bowles, there would’ve been no room for Ryan’s budget, and if he’d proposed it anyway, it would’ve looked like an extreme effort to distract from a promising, bipartisan process. By letting him go first, they lost whatever plaudits they could’ve gotten for boldness and gave the GOP time to commit to a vastly more conservative and objectionable outcome.
As my colleagues Lori Montgomery and Zach Goldfarb smartly point out, “letting others take the lead on complex problems has become a hallmark of the Obama presidency.” But that strategy looks a lot different when the “others” going first are House Republicans rather than Senate Democrats. Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong tomorrow, but for now, it looks like the White House badly miscalculated.
Update: The White House is telling me that Wednesday’s speech will not “primarily an embrace of Simpson-Bowles” and “this will make more sense tomorrow.” So I guess we’ll see.
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