Welfare reform for the whole country

...Obama and House Republican leaders share this much in the coming budget wars: Both are racing to catch up with the train. And just as the president must contend with panicky Democrats, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) faces tea party freshmen wanting to more than double the $32 billion in reductions now proposed by the GOP for the last seven months of this fiscal year...

As now drafted, the House bill promises pro-defense lawmakers in both parties stable funding for the military — not unlike what Democrats proposed in December as part of their own omnibus measure. And while the domestic spending cuts are deep and controversial, Senate Democrats voted by a 2-1 margin just last week in favor of an amendment cutting $44 billion from unobligated funds to pay for a small-business-backed amendment to the health care law...

Running close to two hours and hosted by [Obama lieutenant]Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) in his third floor Capitol offices, the meeting had an equal mix of Democrats—Durbin, Conrad, and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner—and Republicans: Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mike Crapo of Idaho.

Durbin, Conrad, Coburn and Crapo are all veterans of the commission while Warner and Chambliss—an old friend of Boehner’s—have joined forces in an effort to advance the same agenda.

The goal is to revive — in either legislative form or the spring budget resolution — major elements of the commission’s plan to narrow future deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Appropriations cuts would be part of the strategy but so would entitlement and tax reform. And if the senators can show enough political strength, the hope is that this would give Boehner and Obama enough cover to join them.

“If we keep addressing micro parts of the issue we’ll never do anything,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) told POLITICO. “We can’t touch Social Security, or we can’t touch the mortgage-interest deduction. What you’ve got to do is address it in the macro sense. Kind of a shared sacrifice approach and also over time.”

The political stakes in any such bargain are huge. And for Obama it could be the equivalent of Bill Clinton’s famous welfare reform deal — only on steroids. Just as that compromise angered the left but helped Clinton win reelection in 1996, a deficit deal could do the same for Obama.

At the same time, Democrats admit their own frustration that the president has not been more forthcoming in addressing the debt issue.

For example, “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us” was the headline for a weekend op-ed by White House Budget Director Jack Lew promising that Obama’s 2012 budget will “look beyond the obvious” in cutting spending. But Lew is already months behind his fellow Democrats on one of his prime examples — cuts from the Great Lakes restoration initiative.

Lew listed other more significant new cuts –totaling $650 million--from community development and community service block grants. But none of these comes close to the desperate tone of last week’s 81-17 Senate vote on the small-business amendment, in which panic-driven Democrats virtually turned over the keys to the White House to cut whatever it wanted from unobligated appropriations, as long as they met the $44 billion target.