President Barack Obama prides himself on being a clutch player, but he sat happily on the end of the bench as the clock ran out on the supercommittee. Then he took his shot after the buzzer.
Obama ? burned by the failed deficit-reduction talks with Republicans during the summer debt-ceiling fight ? believes that being accused of disengagement is preferable to being lumped with the in-fighting lawmakers who fumbled a chance to reach an agreement by the Monday deadline.
Continue ReadingSo he kept out of direct talks as negotiations imploded, and after both sides conceded failure, he warned Congress that he would veto any attempt to roll back $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts that include steep reductions in military spending.
Obama?s defiance served as the coda to a remarkably disciplined campaign by the White House to keep him as removed as possible from what aides viewed as a doomed process, showing a degree of indifference to Beltway punditry that hasn?t been on display since his days as a candidate, Democrats said.
But it?s not a strategy without risks. Critics from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Democratic budget expert Alice Rivlin chided Obama for sitting out the talks, and a stock market expected to shrug off the committee?s failure plummeted on hearing the latest leading indicator of Beltway dysfunction.
?The president and the leadership of Congress could have cut a deal that the committee would have approved,? said Rivlin, co-chair of a Washington fiscal commission whose recommendations also faltered amid congressional gridlock.
?I don?t think it is the last chance for something to happen, but it?s a huge missed opportunity,? she said in an interview. ?No committee is going to have this power again.?
Team Obama, and many Hill Democrats, believe they have the GOP in a tightening political vise, caught between the party?s need to protect high-earners and corporations from tax hikes, and an increasingly restive middle class whose attention has turned from budget slashing to job growth.
The supercommittee?s breakdown ?seems like a much bigger failure inside the Beltway than outside the Beltway,? said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who, with Republican pollster Ed Goeas, conducts the POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground poll. ?This is going to be perceived as politics as usual.?
Fifty percent of 1,000 registered likely voters surveyed in the latest poll, taken earlier this month, said they?re not at all familiar with the supercommittee, a striking disconnect between Washington and the American public.
Even when the panel?s mission was described, there was little faith that success was possible. Almost 70 percent of those surveyed said the special bipartisan 12-member panel would fail to strike a deal to cut the deficit. Just 21 percent believed it would succeed.
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