President Obama's budget, submitted this week to Congress, is stirring things up, as should be expected. Combating the deepening recession with a near-trillion dollars stimulus plan, and keeping to his campaign promises to reform health care, energy production, combat global warming, and increase education spending, his $3.6 trillion proposal is both ambitious and startling.
The battle lines are already forming. Republicans, as expected, will attack it,hurling labels: "socialism," "unAmerican," "Big Government," etc. Even some democrats are unhappy with cutting farm subsidies to some of their big contributors--those who take in over a half a million dollars a year.
Mr. Obama is fighting back, however. His website has a video presentation of his weekly "radio" address in which he lays out his defense. (Click here to see it)
The video can be accessed directly.
The vested interests, such as the medical and insurance industries, do not like it. So, we can expect a repeat of the advertising blitz that doomed the Clinton proposal in his first year in office. This time, though, the Obama Administration knows what to expect, so I would expect orchestrated counterattacks to shore up the defenses.
There is no way to overstate the sea-change this budget represents. It abandons the Reagan approach that defined government as the problem, and reinstates the Roosevelt approach that placed the federal government front and center of shaping American welfare. It will be interesting to see how this looming battle plays out. Can Mr. Obama use his popular mandate to force through this kind of change? Stay tuned for a round-by-round accounting.
Update on Health Care initiative: (3/5/09)
Although Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton has not directly participated in any of the White House’s planning sessions on health care, her presence is felt in Mr. Obama’s efforts to pass his own health care reform proposals. The work she did 15 years ago, although ultimately unsuccessful, is being used as a model of what and what not to do for the current efforts.
First, the Obama plan is not being drafted in secret, and then handed over to Congress to pass. Mr. Obama’s plan is broadly defined, and Congress will be allowed to shape the details. Secondly, Mr. Obama is introducing his plan only six weeks into his Presidency. Mr. Clinton waited for 11 months to make his move. The delay, according to some, was one of the major factors in its defeat.
Another factor was the focus of the new plan, which stresses cost control, and it allows everyone to keep their current coverage if they want to. One of the things about the Clinton plan that was attacked was the fear that everyone was going to be forced into one type of access to health care.
Mr. Obama has also included at least partial funding ($635 billion) for his proposal in his first budget submitted to Congress. Mr. Clinton did not do this, choosing to focus initially on balancing the budget, which did not allow any room for health care spending. Now, however, the need for health care reform is widely seen as a necessary step to control the costs of Medicare and other federal spending that touches on health care. This means that the proposals of Mr. Obama are facing far less resistance from Congress and, oddly enough, even from the health care industry than the Clinton plan when it was introduced.
These differences may be critical in gaining passage of this most important piece of legislation. Although Mrs. Clinton may be engaged in diplomacy in foreign lands today, her efforts of a decade and a half ago are helping the new President do what he promised to do about bringing important changes to Washington. She may not get the credit for the success, and certainly Mr. Obama deserves all he will get for getting the job done, but Mrs. Clinton knows that her past efforts are providing some broad shoulders for the current Administration to stand on.
