[Posted by Karl]
CNN plans to celebrate Pres. Obama’s 100th day in office as though it was election night. You might do the same if you were sliding into fourth place with key news demographics. But other establishment media outlets are starting to grumble.
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus and the New York Times, for example, are noticing that Obama is getting rolled by Congressional Democrats on a series of issues, like farm subsidies, subsidies for private banks making student loans, an assault weapons ban, global warming taxes and non-starters like his idiotic trial balloon on charging veterans’ insurers for battle-related healthcare costs.
The line from the Obama Administration on the budget is the same to both the NYT and Marcus:
More important, aides say, the final product is likely to provide for passage of health reform by a majority vote if the Senate is gridlocked this fall. That could pave the way for a major victory — enough to erase memories of compromises and capitulations.
However, today’s New York Times foretells a different outcome:
President Obama is running into stiff Congressional resistance to his plans to raise money for his ambitious agenda, and the resulting hole in the budget is threatening a major health care overhaul and other policy initiatives.
The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion.
The unwillingness to embrace some of the major White House tax and revenue proposals has frustrated administration officials.
(And that is before the threatened attempt to railroad healthcare reform runs into the Byrd rule in the Senate.) Obama’s tax plans are as unrealistic as his miniscule spending “cuts,” which the administration tells us “are intended to signal the president’s determination to cut spending and reform government,” but which accomplish the exact opposite result, as the Washington Post editorial board recently noted.
CNN can pretend it is election night at the end of the month. The Obama Administration can pretend its budget is moving forward (and whatever the Congressional Democrats produce will be bad enough). But like a married couple, when the honeymoon is officially over, the big arguments are likely to be over money. Expect a lot of pouting from progressives in the fall.
–Karl