WASHINGTON – Days after several hundred thousand enraged Americans gathered to protest President Obama’s massive spending program, he asked his cabinet to find ways to cut the budget by $100 million.
It was a defensive, seemingly symbolic move intended to blunt the political impact of the nationwide “tea party” rallies that took place last week on April 15 and drew nearly 400,000 Americans to some 300 events from Bakersfield, California, to Atlanta, Georgia , where over 15,000 people took part appeared.
The proposed budget cuts were a paltry sum of money that paled in comparison to Obama’s nearly $4 trillion budget, which spends $100 million every 13.5 minutes. It amounts to one-twentieth of 1 percent of the $192.3 billion budget deficit for March alone.
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw analyzed Obama’s theoretical savings in a different way: $100 million represents 0.003 percent of $3.5 trillion.
The White House’s outside political apparatus has sharply criticized the tax rallies, saying they are the work of lobbying groups in Washington. The truth is, however, that the size, energy and spontaneity of the crowds organized by local taxpayers who had never done anything like this before shocked the White House.
Obama’s strategists feared, some independent analysts concluded, that they might become part of a rapidly growing movement in the country that believes the government is getting too massive, spending is out of control and taxes are too high. They were concerned about Americans’ reaction to Obama’s spending spree in just the past two months, which included a $410 billion omnibus spending bill, an $800 billion economic stimulus and a $3.5 trillion budget for next year.
“What is most striking about the tea movement is that most of the organizers have never organized a protest rally before or even participated in one. The general revulsion has drawn many people from the sidelines into the political arena, and they are already planning political actions,” wrote Glenn Harlan Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal Online.
“This is not a massive Republican effort. This is a great effort by society. However, a mass movement of ordinary people who do not feel that their voices are heard does not bode well for a party that has positioned itself as an organ of hope and change, he reported last week.
Indeed, at Monday’s Cabinet meeting, Obama spoke ominously of “the trust gap when it comes to the American people… We have to earn their trust.”
There are plenty of places in the immense government bureaucracy that could be cut – not just by $100 million, but by several hundred billion dollars in ineffective and inaccessible programs. A good place to start would be the funds already allocated to the economic recovery bill, only some of which will be spent this year.
Already, there are reports of projects with marginal spending that will create few, if any, eternal jobs. In Pawtucket, RI, they plan to spend $550,000 in stimulus money to build a skate park at a local school. Bicycle racks are being installed in Washington, $57 million for questionable research in Ohio, $500,000 for fish food in Missouri, $1.5 million to “improve the streetscape around a casino” in Michigan and $3.8 million for expansion “ARTWalk” in Rochester, New York
Over the past few weeks, the administration has acknowledged “glimmers of hope” that the economy is in the early stages of recovery faster than pessimists predicted. Several vast banks reported profits, home sales began to show signs of life, and mortgage lending and mortgage refinancings increased. If these and other signs of economic recovery continue to improve, there will be real questions about whether the rest of the stimulus funds should be repealed or at least reduced before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to figure out how to tap into the political energy and passion that exploded across the country last week, or whether it’s a meteoric rise.
Activists who belonged to tea parties that attracted vast numbers of ordinary, inactive, middle-class Americans told me that the movement was not going away.
“This movement has legs, there is no doubt about it. The sheer number of people who decided to do something like this, without much advancement or organization, was amazing,” said Jim Sibold, former GOP chairman in DeKalb County, Georgia. There is talk of a massive march on Washington in early October, when the fight over Obama’s budget could reach full fury.
“There has been a revolution in taxes and spending, and it is only just beginning. This is an opportunity or a lost opportunity for the Republican Party, depending on how quickly it acts,” John Brabender, a GOP campaign strategist, told me.
Apparently the White House sensed it too. So Obama’s anemic effort to make additional spending cuts this week. But the independent-minded people who showed up at last week’s Tax Day rallies can add something, and they know the difference between millions, billions and trillions.
“At the end of the day, it’s about independent voters and winning over the majority of them, and we’re a long way from that at this point,” said former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who chaired the GOP congressional campaign committee.
To win over voters, Republicans “have to stick to the message. There is no silver bullet. It took eight years to bring this party down and it won’t be reversed overnight,” he said.
