Washington Stare-Down Intensifies

President Barack Obama as he appeared on
"60 Minutes," January 27, 2013.

This afternoon, President Obama concluded his comments to shipyard workers in Virginia, spouting words of doom about what will happen beginning Friday, if the GOP does not come to terms about resolving the latest self-imposed budget crisis. 

The trigger for this presumed disaster is the ‘sequester,’ a failed political strategy which, at the 11^th hour, has become the straightjacket into which Obama and both branches of the Congress bound themselves in 2011.
Now they are in a cat fight over how to cut the binding.
 
Two days ago in the L.A. Times, Columnist Doyle McManus wrote, “In 2011, when President Obama proposed the scheme [a sequester] and both parties in Congress embraced it, their thinking was:  With a whole year to work on a deal, surely we can figure out a way to avoid a catastrophe.”

Several years ago, an ugly, internecine battle took place over passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), even though the Democratic Party was in full control of the White House and the Congress. 

That struggle foretold the lack of leadership and the absence of bi-partisanship that would continue when the GOP wrested away control of the House of Representatives in the 2012 mid-terms.

The sequester mêlée is over $85 billion – not in budget cuts, mind you, but over lower increases in spending to the current Federal budget.  That amount represents a mere 2.3% of the present spending plan.

But you won’t hear that distinction from President Obama.  With him, the sky is falling – again.  There is not much point in discussing the numbers any further because this beltway battle is not about numbers.

It is about inflated egos, strained ideologies, a multi-generational string of unbroken dependencies, and a politically genetic lack of fiscal discipline -- mainly the latter.