Marco Rubio takes to the blogosphere to make the case against the Obama budget. He writes:
The sheer numbers in the president’s latest spending plan are jaw-dropping: a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, $1.3 trillion next year, and a ten-year deficit outlook of $8.5 trillion. The budget also calls for a permanent expansion of the federal government by 3 percent of GDP; a $2 trillion decades-long tax increase on every single American under the auspices of health-care reform and cap-and-trade energy policies; deficits of more than $1 trillion until 2020; and a doubling of the publicly held national debt to more than $18 trillion.
His argument is simple: kill it and start over. Or as he puts it: “Those who care about our national security, our standing in the world, and the notion of leaving our children a better country than the one we were blessed to inherit must send a clear and unequivocal message to our leaders in Washington: Defeat the president’s budget.”
In some ways, this is an eerie replay of the debate over health care, but in this case the Democrats don’t even momentarily hold the high ground or enjoy the indulgence of the mainstream media. The Obama budget is, however, as Pete Wehner wrote yesterday, symptomatic of the problem facing Democrats: “The president’s new budget — which projects a record-breaking, mind-blowing deficit of $1.56 trillion — is political kryptonite for Democrats; it reinforces the worst possible narrative about them (profligate, fiscally reckless, unprepared to govern).” It is, as Pete noted, another “weight around Democrats’ ankles.”
And it would seem to be smart politics and good policy for Republicans and moderate and conservative Democrats (at least those who aren’t willing to be impaled on Nancy Pelosi’s vaulting pole) to follow Rubio’s lead. Those congressmen and senators who choose instead to tie themselves to the Obama budget will, I suspect, face an enraged electorate. It may be that it takes many more Massachusetts-type upsets and the loss of one or more houses to get everyone’s attention inside the Beltway.
