Excerpt
The White House’s expectations for the special Congressional committee on deficit reduction, never high, have been all but dashed now that the panel has reached a partisan impasse less than two weeks before it is supposed to recommend a compromise plan.
For administration officials, the prospect of the committee’s failure reinforces the decision early on for President Obama to keep his distance, focus on his jobs plan and avoid the sort of prolonged debt-limit fight with Republicans that dragged down his approval ratings last summer.
Starting Friday, Mr. Obama literally will be far away — traveling abroad for meetings with leaders of Pacific nations and returning just four days before the panel’s Nov. 23 deadline.
Yet the potential failure of the committee to agree to $1.2 trillion in 10-year savings also raises the question of what happens next, a question fraught with economic risk in the short term, notwithstanding the automatic cuts of an equal amount that would occur in 2013.
While top advisers, chiefly Mr. Obama’s budget director, Jacob J. Lew, are in contact with some of the committee’s members to stay abreast of its private deliberations, the hands-off approach of the president and his top advisers reflects a sense at the White House, borne out by polls, that a year away from the 2012 election more Americans say they believe Mr. Obama has been more willing to compromise and that Republicans are blocking a deal to avoid raising taxes on the wealthy.
Also, while Republicans taunted on Wednesday that Mr. Obama’s absence from the fray on Capitol Hill showed a lack of leadership, administration officials and members of both parties privately say neither side wanted the White House at the table this time — witness the fact that the law creating the 12-member committee provided seats for six lawmakers from each party only — to see if Congress could succeed where previous White House-led efforts had failed.
And with the economic recovery at risk and Democrats pressing for help, Mr. Obama sees greater economic and political benefit in emphasizing his $447 billion job-creation plan rather than longer-range deficit reduction. And that is precisely what he has been doing all over the country since September, after giving the committee his own proposals for $3 trillion in tax increases and spending cuts to reduce projected deficits over 10 years.
“The president put forward his detailed, specific plan to go well above and beyond the mandate,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.
“There is only one existential question when it comes to the supercommittee,” Mr. Pfeiffer added, “and that is, are the Republicans willing to ask the wealthy to pay more taxes? If the answer to that question is no, then they are potentially dooming the supercommittee to failure.”
Republicans, wary of being put on the defensive and positioning to avert blame should the committee fail, proposed this week to raise what they said was nearly $500 billion in new revenues over 10 years by limiting tax deductions, increasing Medicare premiums and counting on economic growth to bring in more income taxes.
Yet the White House and Democrats in Congress did not see a crack in Republicans’ longstanding anti-tax stand. They dismissed the overture, in part because the Republicans also proposed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts on high-income Americans past their scheduled expiration at the end of next year, which would cost more than $800 billion over a decade. Mr. Obama has threatened to veto another extension.
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