Who is Obama?

From the Swamp a blog connected to the Chicago Tribune

In the East Room of the White House, the president is following a script: Calling on reporters whom his aides have identified ahead of time as those who will be called on for questions.

Obama also is speechifying. Twenty minutes after his opening statement, he had gotten through just four questions - largely because of the length of his answers.

Nearly 40 minutes in, just eight questions.

Could it be that the president is filibustering?

Crowding out his own news conference with his own answers? The effect of the uninterrupted responses of a clearly articulate, and tonight also wordy, president, is to curtail the overall number of questions that are coming his way this evening.

OK, Chip Reid?

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. At both of your town hall meetings in California last week, you said, quote, "I didn't run for president to pass on our problems to the next generation."

But under your budget, the debt will increase $7 trillion over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says $9.3 trillion. And today on Capitol Hill, some Republicans called your budget, with all the spending on health care, education and environment, the most irresponsible budget in American history.

OBAMA: Yes.

QUESTION: Isn't that kind of debt exactly what you were talking about when you said "passing on our problems to the next generation"?

OBAMA: First of all, I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because, as I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them. That would be point number one.

Point number two. Both under our estimates and under the CBO estimates, both -- the most conservative estimates out there, we drive down the deficit over the first five years of our budget. The deficit is cut in half. And folks aren't disputing that.

OBAMA: Where the dispute comes in is what happens in a whole bunch of out-years. And the main difference between the budget that we presented and the budget that came out of the Congressional Budget Office is assumptions about growth.

They're assuming a growth rate of 2.2 percent; we're assuming a growth rate of 2.6 percent. Those small differences end up adding up to a lot of money. Our assumptions are perfectly consistent with what Blue Chip forecasters out there are saying.

Now, none of us know exactly what's going to happen 6 or 8 or 10 years from now. Here's what I do know: If we don't tackle energy, if we don't improve our education system, if we don't drive down the costs of health care, if we're not making serious investments in science and technology and our infrastructure, then we won't grow 2.6 percent, we won't grow 2.2 percent. We won't grow.

And so what we've said is, let's make the investments that ensure that we meet our growth targets that put us on a pathway to growth as opposed to a situation in which we're not making those investments and we still have trillion-dollar deficits.

And there's an interesting reason why some of these critics haven't put out their own budget. I mean, we haven't seen an alternative budget out of them.

And the reason is because they know that, in fact, the biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health care costs that we've got out here that we're going to have to tackle and we -- that if we don't deal with some of the structural problems in our deficit, ones that were here long before I got here, then we're going to continue to see some of the problems in those out-years.

And -- and so what we're trying to emphasize is, let's make sure that we're making the investments that we need to grow to meet those growth targets, at the same time we're still reducing the deficit by a couple of trillion dollars, we are cutting out wasteful spending in areas like Medicare, we're changing procurement practices when it comes to the Pentagon budget, we are looking at social service programs and education programs that don't work and eliminate them.

And we will continue to go line by line through this budget, and where we find programs that don't work, we will eliminate them.

But it is -- it is going to be an impossible task for us to balance our budget if we're not taking on rising health care costs, and it's going to be an impossible task to balance our budget or even approximate it if we are not boosting our growth rates. And -- and that's why our budget focuses on the investments we need to make that happen.

QUESTION: But even under your budget, as you said, over the next four or five years, you're going to cut the deficit in half, then, after that, six years in a row, it goes up, up, up. If you're making all these long-term structural cuts, why does it continue to go up in the out-years?

OBAMA: Well, look, it is going to take a whole host of adjustments, and we couldn't reflect all of those adjustments in this budget.

Let me give you an example. There's been a lot of talk about entitlements in Medicare and Medicaid. The biggest problem we have long term is Medicare and Medicaid. But whatever reforms we initiate on that front -- and we're very serious about working on a bipartisan basis to reduce those deficits or reduce those costs -- you're not going to see those savings reflected until much later.

And so a budget is a snapshot of what we can get done right now, understanding that, 8, 10 years from now, we will have had a whole series of new budgets and we're going to have to make additional adjustments.

And once we get out of this current economic crisis, then it's going to be absolutely important for us to take another look and say, are we growing as fast as we need to grow? Are there further cuts that we need to make? What other adjustments are -- is it going to take for us to have a sustainable budget level?

But, keep in mind, just to give one other example, as a percentage of gross domestic product, we are reducing non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest level since the '60s, lower than it was under Reagan, lower than it was under Clinton, lower than it was under Bush, or both Bushes.

OBAMA: And so, if we're growing, if we are doing what's necessary to create new businesses and to expand the economy, and we are making sure that we're eliminating some of these programs that aren't working, then, over time, that gap can close.

But I'm -- look, I'm not going to lie to you. It is tough. As I said, that's why the critics tend to criticize, but they don't offer an alternative budget. Because even if we were not doing health care, we were not doing energy, we were not doing education, they'd still have a whole bunch of problems in those out-years, according to CBO projections. The only difference is that we will not have invested in what's necessary to make this economy grow.

Is Lourdes (ph) here from Univision (ph)?

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. Today, your administration presented a plan to help curb the violence in Mexico and also to control any or prevent any spillover of the violence into the United States.

Do you consider the situation now a national security threat? And do you believe that it could require sending national troops to the border? Governor Perry of Texas -- Texas has said that you still need more troops and more agents. How do you respond to that?

OBAMA: Well, first of all, let's focus on what we did today. It's very significant.

We are sending millions of dollars in additional equipment to provide more effective surveillance. We are providing hundreds of additional personnel that can help control the border, deal with customs issues.

We are coordinating very effectively with the Mexican government and President Calderon, who has taken on an extraordinarily difficult task of dealing with these drug cartels that have gotten completely out of hand.

And so the steps that we've taken are designed to make sure that the border communities in the United States are protected and you're not seeing a spillover of violence and that we are helping the Mexican government deal with a very challenging situation.

Now, we are going to continue to monitor the situation. And if the steps that we've taken do not get the job done, then we will do more. One last point that I want to make about this. As I said, President Calderon has been very courageous in taking on these drug cartels. We've got to also take some steps, even as he is doing more to deal with the drug cartels, sending drugs into the United States, we need to do more to make sure that illegal guns and cash aren't flowing back to these cartels.

That's part of what's financing their operations. That's part of what's arming them. That's what makes them so dangerous. And this is something that we take very seriously and we're going to continue to work on diligently in the months to come.

Kevin Baron, Stars and Stripes? Is Kevin here? There you go.