It Must Be Farther Than It Looks

Lots of rhetoric about "sequester" coming out of Washington, DC.  That's the cute little gimmick that Obama devised last year when the two sides couldn't agree on a debt ceiling increase, tax increases, or much else.  If you've been living on Mars, there's a pretty good explanation of it here.  And here it is in a nutshell...

"White House officials proposed it as part of the agreement that resolved the 2011 debt ceiling fight. It was meant to act as a spur to make a bipartisan supercommittee reach an agreement on a package of spending cuts and tax increases that would reduce the national debt over time."

So once again it's a mess.  Why do we keep sending the same knuckleheads back to Congress anyway?  The power of incumbency is really perplexing.  But that's the subject of another post on another day.

The budget axe is coming.  The bad thing is that it is across the board cuts with no discretion given to any government departments to decide how to implement the cuts.  So it will be dramatic, difficult, and painful.

But I keep going back to the question of what could be done about it.  During the debates Obama said sequester would never happen.  He was pretty confident that the Republicans would cave like they have consistently done.  But then came the State of the Union and he came out with his "my way or the highway" policy.  More taxes.  More spending.  Take it or leave it.  But maybe he's not going to get away with it.  Now we see him in typical campaign mode.  He doesn't know any other way to operate.  He particularly doesn't know how to get something done with people who aren't ideologically aligned with him.  He's gone to North Carolina.  He's gone to Florida.  He's gone to Chicago.  He's got all the right backdrop and right sob stories.  He's played some golf.   But guess what he hasn't done?  He hasn't gone down the street to the Capital.  I wondered how far it was so I Googled it.  Turns out it's not that far

"If you Google Earth the two buildings, the distance is about 1.6 miles between them door to door. You would use Pennsylvania Avenue as the most direct route."

 So he can go all around the country campaigning to stop sequestration, but he can't go down the street to talk personally to Congressional leaders.  Or call them down to,the White House.  The road does go both ways.  I've been there and can verify that.  The White House Press Secretary verified today that in 2013 Obama hasn't had one meeting with Congress about sequestration.

So who's serious and who's looking for political advantage.  Oh I know...there probably a fair amount of blame on both sides.  But I think in this case most of it lands squarely on Obama.  He's the President.  We expect leadership out of our Presidents.  That is clearly lacking here.  Sadly...that is a consistent fact of life.