Which Obama Will Show Up to Deliver Today's Budget Speech?

[Better Believe It]

Which Obama Will Show Up to Deliver Today's Budget Speech?
By Joshua Holland
April 12, 2011

There are wildly conflicting reports about what kind of speech President Obama will give when he addresses the nation on the budget fight today. Which Obama will show up this afternoon? Will it be the progressive who ran and won in 2008 by shining a bright light on the way excessive corporate power distorts our economic policies, promising an approach that, in his own words, “begins with one word that's on everyone's mind, and it's easy to spell: J-O-B-S"? Or will it be the president whose hearty embrace of Washington's deficit hysteria has made the Right's calls for drastic and painful budget cuts appear “bipartisan,” and therefore ultimately sensible?

According to the Washington Post, Obama will use his speech to essentially endorse the conclusions of the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, also known as the "Catfood Commission." That would be a call for cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy and raising them on the middle class, trimming “entitlement” spending – raising the retirement age for Social Security in addition to unspecified future “reforms” to Medicare – slashing the federal workforce, cutting public workers' pensions, cutting subsidized student loans and eliminating a slew of tax deductions targeted at the middle class.

But it's also the case that the needle Obama is trying to thread creates confusion. He's accepted the dangerous idea that spending should be cut right in the middle of a shaky, jobless “recovery,” and, in an attempt to hold onto his progressive base while reaching out to independents, he's suggesting his opponents' remedies are radical and that he'd essentially be a more responsible Republican than the Republicans. Small wonder that political reporters are left guessing which way he'll go.

Which President Obama will show up at that lectern today? That remains to be seen. But we can be sure that Obama won't argue, forcefully, that we have deficit caused by runaway health-care costs, decades of tax cuts unmatched by reductions in spending and an unsustainably high military budget – that the whole issue is being demagogued as a premise for cutting Social Security, Medicare and other very popular programs.

Read the full article at:

http://www.alternet.org/news/150591/which_obama_will_show_up_to_deliver_today%27s_budget_speech/?page=1

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1. oval office obama or campaign obama? nt

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2. K&R