Man, I like to joke around about John Dickerson being the King of False Equivalence, but he's making it really easy for me with this new piece. What's the subhed? "On the budget, President Obama sounds a lot like candidate McCain." (Slate's editors must have a template for these pieces: 'On the ______, President Obama sounds a lot like candidate McCain.')
How does Dickerson make this tendentious argument? Well, yesterday the administration outlined $17 billion in cuts from the budget, focused on ineffective programs. Dickerson observes that this isn't all that much, and that Obama used to chide McCain for his focus on eliminating earmarks, which make up $18 billion of the federal budget. (Set aside the fact that ending earmarks wouldn't end the spending, it would just change how outlays are allocated.) The current cuts, Dickerson suggests, are the same kind of meaningless gesture toward deficit reduction that Obama accused McCain of abusing. Obama should really be making some grand gesture.
Dickerson is right that $17 billion is really a drop in the budget bucket, though it is also a pretty good chunk of non-defense discretionary spending. He's on thinner ice suggesting that Obama is just pretending to care about the budget deficit. But whether you want to ascribe Obama's motivations to principle or politics, the fact is that the president is making a bold move on the deficit -- health care reform. Dickerson, in another trope common to these pieces, admits as much in the second-to-last paragraph: "[Obama] and his budget director, Peter Orszag, argue so passionately for health care reform because they say it's the only way to tackle growing deficits. Obama also continues to talk about reforming Social Security, an unpopular topic in many quarters, including in his own party."
Meanwhile, "candidate McCain's" most striking budget policy was an across-the-board freeze that was predictably riddled with exceptions for things like defense spending but not for inflation-adjusted social programs that, if spending was kept at present levels, would result in effective cuts to programs that Americans need during a recession.
I've got no problem with criticizing the small-ball cuts in ineffective programs (although that requires admitting that Obama is keeping a campaign promise) and encouraging the president to fight harder for cost-saving measures like cutting agribusiness subsidies or increasing revenue, but trying to make that criticism part and parcel to some absurd hypocrisy charge is a poor form of analysis. Dickerson's problem is that Obama has put forward one of the more responsible federal budgets since, well, Bill Clinton. But if he compares it to the nonsense spouted on the campaign trail, instead of actual past budgets, Dickerson can score some cheap points.
-- Tim Fernholz
