The unprecedented accumulation of debt under Obama's budget - $9.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office - is a time bomb that could waylay the administration once the recession has passed and interest rates start to rise again. If there is a weakness in Obama's poll numbers, this is it, with fewer than half in the Pew poll approving of his handling of the deficit.
Moreover, both parties in Congress are spurning the deficit-reducing measures that Obama proposed - be it trimming tax deductions for the wealthy or eliminating weapons programs - begging the question of how deficits will be controlled.
And this summer, the focus will shift to Congress on two of the biggest items on the Obama agenda: health care and climate change. Either one would be enough to absorb all of Washington's energy for the next year.
There are clear signs that Democrats will water down Obama's proposals for a cap-and-trade system to raise the cost of greenhouse-gas emissions and, by extension, energy.
Differences on health care
By contrast, Democrats view health care reform as a political necessity, something that, unlike global warming, most voters care about personally. Yet as much as voters are unhappy with the current health system, the actual details dictating how their own health care would change are sure to expose ideological divisions about who should provide health care and how it should be paid for.
For revenue, Democrats are looking at a variation of a method Obama ridiculed when Republican presidential candidate John McCain offered it during last year's election: taxing health care benefits provided by employers. Health care consultant Robert Laszewski estimates that the type of health reform Obama campaigned on would cost $1.5 trillion over a decade. He sees the Senate coalescing around an idea to raise $552 billion by limiting the tax exclusion on health care benefits for high-income earners.
Dems' strong majority
Democratic congressional leaders reached tentative agreement late last week to use a special budget process called reconciliation to push health care reform through the Senate on a simple 50-plus-one majority vote, rather than the 60 votes most legislation now needs to defeat a filibuster.
Democrats have an effective 58-vote majority. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Reagan used reconciliation to enact their first-term economic policies, but doing so on health care would mean Democrats abandon their hope to get bipartisan consensus on such a major undertaking.
"Ultimately, the question is how many sharp knives can he juggle at once," said Donald Kettl, incoming dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. "What about climate change, what about health care, what about things other than Afghanistan, the banking crisis and the economy? Can he take on anything else?"
All the issues Obama is dealing with now, from the auto industry to Afghanistan, are focused on executive decisions. If Congress does not step up on health care and climate change, Kettl said, the administration could become "an executive-centered government of the sort that Dick Cheney only could have dreamed of."
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
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