Jeemie wrote:Methinks that planned $3.6 trillion budget is going to run into some significant difficulties.
Hope and change!
Unlike most conservatives out there, I don't think that Obama is the biggest socialist, liberal, left winger ever to come down the pike. I think he is a man with few overall social and economic principles whose goal is always personal rather than political. Neither the stimulus package nor the current budget were put out there for ideological reasons by Obama. Instead, he pretty much ceded responsibility to Pelosi and company, especially on the stimulus (essentially their payoff for supporting him in the primaries). They were motivated by ideological reasons (which is why a strong executive hand was necessary and sorely lakcing in order to reign in the stimulus).
Other than give his usual speeches, Obama did little for the stimulus, allowing Specter and his Gang of Three to cut it up a good bit (and they could easily have asked for, and gotten, a whole lot more). The Republicans lost the battle on the stimulus by sheer numbers; but they made their points with the public.
Now liberals and moderates are reaping what they have sown. Again Pelosi and company have packed the budget with goodies and again Obama is making speeches. But the public's willingness to go along is a lot less and a few of the conservative Democrats like Landrieu and the Nelsons are having second thoughts. This budget is going to get hacked to bits before they are through and you can kiss education reform, health care reform, and a lot of other things the public supports (and which a more patient group of Democrats might have gotten) goodbye for the forseeable future.
What you won't kiss goodbye are mounting deficits and Republican claims that Obama is some wide-eyed radical Socialist, and the longer the economy stays in the tank, the more the public will listen to those claims and the pendulum could swing to the right again in a hurry. Anyone who is truly liberal (and I count myself among that number) will find Obama to be the absolute worst sort of President, an incompetent without any real values whose desperation to appeal to all will result in his being labelled the worst sort of radical.