To listen to recent speeches made by President Barack Obama, one would think that a doomsday scenario awaits the America public if the full effect of sequestration hits on March 1, 2013. He has gone to the American public to inform them how these cuts will affect them, and he has done so by creating a hysterical laundry list that he hopes will reach each individual American. Obama has also made attempts, in these recent speeches, to pin the blame for these cuts squarely on the Republicans in Congress.
One fear that appears to supercede the fear of taking blame for these proposed cuts is that the cuts will not be felt by the American public. At the end of the day, they fear, no one will notice one way or another. To get out in front of this, Obama has painted a doomsday scenario of the cuts that require more fiscal responsibility from each of the administration’s cabinets. Some of the fears that he, and others, have put out there are that we will have no teachers, no firemen, and no defense. The proposed cuts are, in effect, reductions in the current rate of growth. The federal government will continue to grow, in other words, but it will not grow as much as the federal government originally projected it would in 2013 and beyond.
As the site Red Alert Politics states, “Despite all the hype, surprisingly little will change after sequestration takes effect on March 1. There will be a few minor cuts here and there, but overall, Congress will continue to spend more money than it has available and federal spending will continue to grow dramatically over time. Sequestration will only trim $85 billion from an overall budget of $3.6 trillion in fiscal year 2013. The cut amounts to approximately 2.4 percent of the current budget and is only about .5 percent of the $16 trillion U.S. GDP. Even after sequestration, federal spending will continue to increase by nearly $2 trillion over the next decade. Although sequestration will reduce the Defense budget by $492 billion over ten years, Defense spending will continue to climb by an astonishing 17 percent during that same period despite the scheduled draw down of operations in Afghanistan. While the Department of Transportation would be force to cut $1 billion, that would still equate to more than it spent in 2012. And the Department of Energy’s budget will still increase by 7% after sequestration. The impending budget sequestration has been called reckless, shameful and, most creatively, a “doomsday machine.” In actuality, those are all great words to describe the nation’s current fiscal trajectory, even after sequestration.{1}
To put these projected decreases of the projected federal budget increases in more common language, former Senator J.C. Watts offered this:
“It’s equivalent to a child complaining to a parent and saying that they deserve a $20.00 allowance, or an increase of $10.00 to their current $10.00 allowance. When the two of you then agree on a $15.00 compromise, and that child runs out to anyone that will hear him complain that you have given him a $5.00 cut in his allowance, you have an equivalent to the argument that the president is making.”
In order to prove their point that these projected cuts will cause harm, right-wing commentators have charged that administration officials are planning to make very specific and harmful cuts that will affect the most Americans possible so that they will take notice. These commentators have charged that cabinet officials have great latitude in the cuts they make, but that they will choose those cuts that cause the most harm to the most people possible so that they will sit back and take notice of the consequential role government has in their lives. Former Bush campaign advisor Karl Rove has stated that the Republicans should get in front of this possibility and pass a bill that expressly grants Obama's cabinet officials latitude in the cuts that they decide upon. “This,” says Rove, “will make formal the discretion that the administration, and its cabinet officials, have in the designated cuts they eventually decide to make. Passing such a bill, then calling these officials before a committee to answer for the cuts that they eventually make, in the wake of this bill, will take much of the blame away from Republicans.”
At this point, it is the president that is getting in front of the matter. Other than warning about the harm these cuts would cause some Americans, the president is engaging in a full force campaign to divert blame from his administration to the Republicans. In a 2011 press conference, the president stated that he would veto any sequester legislation put before him. The inference being made there was that any sequester legislation put before him was wholly the creation of the Republicans in Congress and not the administration's. On Aug. 2, 2011, however, the president signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 that mandated these automatic sequester cuts.{2}
Even with such concrete proof that the administration signed such legislation, they are counting on the fact that most of the American public either hasn’t heard about this Budget Control Act, or that they won’t remember it. The president, and his administration, are currently engaging in press conferences, speeches, and cable TV appearances, to state and restate the fact that the Republicans are responsible for these proposed cuts. As anyone that has followed this administration’s activity—and the media’s coverage of it—knows, they usually get away with this. On this occasion, unfortunately, it appears that one journalist, an editor of the Washington Post named Bob Woodward, stands in their way.
For reasons unknown, Woodward has come out to state that what the White House is professing, regarding which faction was instrumental in creating sequestration, is not true. Woodward went so far in his piece to suggest that President Obama and his cabinet official Jack Lew were lying when they suggested that Republicans were responsible for initiating this legislation. Citing several insiders within the Obama administration, that Woodward quoted for his 2012 best-selling book The Price of Politics, Woodward informed us that these insiders provided insights into how the White House (and not Congress) originally proposed the March 1 budget cuts.{3}
Knowing the harm that the respected journalist, Bob Woodward, could have in divulging such information, White House Economic Council official Gene Sperling called Woodward, prior to the publication of this piece, suggesting that Woodward would “regret doing this (publishing it).”
In response to Sperling’s alleged threat, Woodward appeared on the February 27th episode of The Situation Room to state that he was: “Very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters you're going to regret doing something. Let's hope it's not the strategy.”
The White House is downplaying the bullying of the Washington Post journalist by saying that there was no intent to threaten him. It also says that an email was sent to Woodward to apologize for the previous phone call from which the accusations of the alleged threat originated. {4}
Whether or not there was an actual threat made in this instance, a question that arises out of the ashes of this story is how often do administration officials threaten members of the media? Watching the manner in which the media has portrayed this administration these last four years, one would assume that they control every word that media members say about them. Naysayers to this idea, say that that would be impossible in America today. There are too many outlets, too many reporters, and too many wild cards in the media today for them to completely control it. The question then becomes how powerful are these wild cards? Most of the wild cards, that report negative information about the administration, are located in talk radio and the blogosphere, and they can be easily dismissed by the administration as partisan and marginal. Legendary journalist Bob Woodward cannot be dismissed so easily, on either basis. So, what happens when administration officials cannot marginalize those that speak out against them? They call that journalist up and attempt to intimidate them from reporting on them in a negative manner. How often is this done, and is Gene Sperling simply a wild card that acted in an unprecedented manner? As Woodward said, “Let’s hope it’s not the strategy,” and for the record Woodward has stated that he presumes that Obama had nothing to do with the intimidation call, and many media members have stated that they've read the transcript, and they see no threat made. When one listens closely to throwaway lines made by people like the host of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace, and others, that suggest that the administration puts in repeated calls anytime a story they perceive to be even the least bit negative is put on the air, it suggests that the attempts to intimidate Woodward are, at the very least, not unprecedented.
{1}http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/02/26/apocalypse-now-seven-stats-illust...
{2}http://www.examiner.com/article/white-house-threatened-bob-woodward-for-...
{3}http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bob-woodward-obamas-sequester-dea...
{4}http://www.examiner.com/article/bob-woodward-of-the-washington-post-thre...
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