Media Shocked that Former “Sen. Present” Punts on the Budget

By Jason Johnson | Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 | Policy

Talk about the triumph of hope over experience: when President Obama released his fiscal year 2012 budget plan yesterday, it was rightly panned by Congressional leaders and other conservative writers for its anemic spending cuts in the face of a staggering debt and avoidance of much-needed entitlement reform. More interesting, though, is the response from some of the president’s most prominent cheerleaders:

From the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:

With the release of Obama’s budget proposal, Washington’s budgeting style can instead be described as tiptoeing past the can and hoping nobody notices.

Obama’s budget proposal is a remarkably weak and timid document. He proposes to cut only $1.1 trillion from federal deficits over the next decade – a pittance when you consider that the deficit this year alone is in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. The president makes no serious attempt at cutting entitlement programs that threaten to drive the government into insolvency.

Contrast that with the proposal by the heads of Obama’s fiscal commission, who outlined a way to cut $4 trillion from deficits through 2020, rein in entitlement spending, overhaul the tax code and reduce the government’s debt load. As commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s White House, told The Post’s Lori Montgomery, Obama’s budget is “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”

And from The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan:

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

Forgive me for not being surprised. Perhaps if Milbank and Sullivan had been paying attention to then-Senator Obama’s voting record during the 2008 presidential election, they wouldn’t be surprised, either, that the senator noted for voting “present” on controversial issues would continue to vote “present” when, as President, the going gets tough.

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