President Obama's budget sermon

In his efforts to work with the Republican leaders in Congress on budget cutting, President Barack Obama continues to play the card of we're-all-in-this-together. He prefers to give them the benefit of the doubt on their willingness to buy into the old American notion of shared responsibility for the most disadvantaged among us.

The president's speech on the need to get the nation's fiscal house in order included a lengthy sermon on the "conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity," with an awareness that "there but for the grace of God go I."

Americans, he said, have consistently embraced the concept of a social safety net that includes Social Security, Medicare and other programs supported by federal taxes. "As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally borne a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate," he said. "Everybody pays, but the wealthier have borne a little more. ... It's a basic reflection of our belief that those who've benefited most from our way of life can afford to give back a little bit more."

All this was a way of reopening the fight he caved in on at the end of last year, to end the portion of the Bush tax cuts for the nation's wealthiest Americans. As times have gotten tougher, Obama said, they need now to step up to the plate. But the new GOP plan written by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, he argued, would among other things undercut Medicare and Medicaid and "lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we're known, certainly in my lifetime."

While maintaining a general tone of reasonableness, Obama said "this vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America." He called it a vision wherein "even though we can't afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that."

He continued: "In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That's who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm president."

Through most of last year's midterm election campaign, Obama sought to avoid the widely predicted Republican gains in Congress by hammering at the opposition party's failure to help the economic recovery, after having "driven the car into the ditch" with its own spendthrift economic policies. But the tactic of blaming the Bush administration did him no good.

Nevertheless, in this week's speech he returned more subtly to the same theme, noting how in the 1990s the first President George Bush, President Bill Clinton and both Democratic and Republican Congresses had worked together, finally producing a budget surplus under Clinton. "They largely protected the middle class, they largely protected our commitment to seniors, they protected our key investments in our future," Obama said.

Thereafter, however, "we lost our way in the decade that followed," he observed. "We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -- but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -- tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade."

Whether dusting off the blame-George-W argument will work any better in the next budget fight than it did in last year's campaign is questionable. But pointing out that continuing his tax cuts for the rich is inconsistent with shredding the social safety net should at least indicate to complaining liberal Democrats that Obama has not entirely abandoned them.

Columnist Jules Witcover's latest book is "Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption." His email address is juleswitcover@comcast.net.