Obama's fault

Obama's first big initiative was to create an overdue but expensive new entitlement, the Affordable Care

Our feckless leaders may be incapable of passing a budget, but, boy, can they pass the buck. The White House spent last week in full campaign hysteria, blitzing online followers with the message that heartless Republicans are prepared to transform America into "Les Misérables" in order to protect "millionaires and billionaires, oil companies, vacation homes, and private jet owners." Republicans retort that the budget-cutting Doomsday device called sequester was actually invented by the White House.

In fact, the conceptual paternity of sequester was bipartisan. Both sides agreed that Congress should set in motion an automatic deficit-cutting scheme so draconian that it would force a divided Washington to come together around some sane compromise. The scandal is that Washington is so incapable of adult behaviour that it can do the right thing only if it is staring down the barrel of a shotgun - and, it turns out, not even then.

Some of this is the fault of a budget-making system that is a mess of special favours, stopgap measures, side deals, promissory notes and flimflam. And, of course, it is true that much of the responsibility for our perpetual crisis can be laid at the feet of a pigheaded Republican Party, cowed by its angry, antispending, antitaxing, anti-Obama base. When it comes to distributing blame for the consequences of sequester - jobs lost, investments put on hold, downgraded credit ratings and withering GDP, not to mention the longer lines at airport security - the polls show a plurality of voters are likely to take it out on the Republicans. If all you care about is winning more Democratic seats in the 2014 midterms, then you can sit back and enjoy the show.

But if you care about the long-term health of the country, the president has more to answer for than just inventing a particular type of fiscal time bomb. The large mess we are in is in no small part the result of missed opportunities and political miscalculation at 1600 Pennsylvania. So, while we await the fate of Yellowstone Park and food safety, let's contemplate the road not taken by the White House - that is, the high road.

When President Obama told us in his first Inaugural Address that our time of "putting off unpleasant decisions" was over, advocates of reforming our fiscal disorder read that as a promise that the new president would go beyond the perennial economic quick fix. After pulling the country back from the brink of depression by pumping some stimulus into the system (thumbs up for that), it seemed plausible that he would make some hard choices to put the promises of government more in balance with its resources.

Instead, the president's first big initiative was to create an overdue but expensive new entitlement, the Affordable Care Act. I'm not one of those who fault him for putting health care at the front of the line. But Obama emerged from that battle looking like a president who had spent the last of his political capital. And the great fiscal issues remained unaddressed.

His next act was to launch a bipartisan commission to grapple with those "unpleasant decisions" promised on Inauguration Day. In December 2010 the commission, led by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, delivered its list of spending cuts and revenue increases, plus the entitlement reforms necessary to fortify Medicare and Social Security for the surge of baby-boom retirees.

The Simpson-Bowles agenda was imperfect, and had plenty to offend ideologues of the left and right, which meant that it was the very manifestation of what Obama likes to call "a balanced approach." So did he seize it as an opportunity for serious debate about our fiscal mess? No, he abandoned it. Instead, he built a re-election campaign that was long on making the wealthiest pay more in taxes, short on spending discipline, and firmly hands-off on the problem of entitlements.

If Obama had campaigned on some version of Simpson-Bowles rather than on poll-tested tax hikes alone, he could now claim a mandate from voters to do something big and bold. Most important, he would have some leverage with members of his own base who don't want to touch Medicare even to save it. This was missed opportunity no 1.

© 2013 The New York Times News Service