The President made an appearance at the House Republican Retreat in Baltimore today, and it was quite a show, particularly as he answered pointed questions from several conservative luminaries like House Study Committee chairman Mike Pence, House Budget Committee ranking member Paul Ryan, and House GOP leadership member Marsha Blackburn.
The transcript is here, and a summary from Talking Points Memo along with the video is here.
Much of the exchange involved Obama’s argument that he’s frequently incorporated Republican ideas in the policy proposals that congressional Republicans have uniformly rejected, and House GOP complaints that the president doesn’t take seriously their larger proposals on health care or the economy. On several occasions, Obama gently reminded the audience that he can only take policies seriously if actual experts do, and if they are even theoretically workable. But this didn’t keep House GOPers from brandishing copies of their “plans” as though heft guaranteed substance.
Since Obama and House Republicans are operating from different perceptions of basic reality, and different “facts,” along with different points of view, there was never any likelihood that today’s gabfest would create some new bipartisan breakthrough, even on minor issues. But perhaps it will inhibit Republican elected officials a bit from indulging their base voters and activists in some of their more lurid expressions of hatred and calumny towards the president. And in the meantime, it offered Democrats some nice video clips of Obama more or less running circles around his would-be tormenters with relative ease.

The National Tea Party Convention scheduled to rev up next week at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville took another major hit yesterday, as two of the three big headline speakers, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, canceled their appearances, citing possible House Ethics Committee problems with the financing of the event by the for-profit group Tea Party Nation. This development compounds the widespread criticism of the convention by many tea party activists, and the withdrawal of several major sponsors, with most critics condemning the high registration cost to participants and/or the uncertain disposition of convention proceeds.
At present, the Tea Party Convention’s grip on credibility is pretty much down to one finger-hold: keynote speaker Sarah Palin, who, as of yesterday, said she was still planning to join the hoedown in Nashville. Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent posted this excerpt from an interview Palin did with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren:

Oh, you betcha I’m going to be there. I’m going to speak there because there are people traveling from many miles away to hear what that tea party movement is all about and what that message is that should be received by our politicians in Washington. I’m honored to get to be there.
I won’t personally gain from being there. The speaker’s fee will go right back into the cause. I’ll be able to donate it to people and to events, those things that I believe in that will help perpetuate the message, the message being, Government, you have constitutional limits. You better start abiding by them.

Aside from Palin’s presence, the Tea Party Convention still enjoys sponsorship from some pretty heavy right-wing hitters, including Judicial Watch, the American Taxpayers Union, Eagle Forum and Vision America. One Christian Right warhorse, Judge Roy Moore, is still scheduled to speak, though it’s unclear whether another, Rick Scarborough, will show. It will be fascinating to see how conservative media, most notably Tea Party loudspeaker Fox News, covers the event.
The Greater Meaning of the convention’s gradual unraveling is as hard to deduce as its original significance. Some originally pointed to it as the beginning of a third party effort, while others charged it with representing the takeover of the Tea Party Movement by the GOP. Since it can’t be both, it’s obvious that experts differ on this score. It’s entirely possible that the event’s questionable financial structure and high registration fees really are the only beef. From my own past dealings with events involving Members of Congress, I’m sure that Bachmann’s and Blackburn’s Ethics Committee concerns are perfectly legitimate, whatever else may be going on.
The whole thing is becoming a source of embarrassment for both Tea Party activists and their Republican allies, at a time when they supposedly are marching arm in arm towards Washington to rout the godless Socialists and Terrorist Lovers who currently occupy the seats of power.

So lots of Americans, we are told, really wish the president would reach out to the Republican Party and come up with bipartisan solutions for our nation’s problems. This very day, the president is in fact trudging up to Baltimore to attend a retreat of the House Republican Caucus, an organization devoted to his complete political destruction.
But before anyone gets agitated about “bipartisan solutions” or the failure to achieve them, it’s important to take a look at where Republicans actually are on big controversial issues–like, just to pull one example out of the air, health care policy.
At the New Republic today, Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy Jost gives us a refresher course on GOP health care policy, from AHiPs to interstate insurance sales. He concludes their proposals wouldn’t do a whole lot for the uninsured, the insured, or health care costs and federal spending. But the most important conclusion he reaches is that there simply isn’t a lot of “common ground” on which to build any sort of bipartisan compromise.
The two parties presently come at the issue in fundamentally different ways, with Republicans, in particular, being transfixed by the desire to encourage the purchase of individual health insurance policies, if not individual purchases of health care without insurance.
Maybe the president and House Republicans can find plenty to talk about in Baltimore today. But comparing notes on health reform is probably a waste of time.

I finally got around to reading a much-derided Sally Quinn column that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday, and I have to say, you really have to read it to believe it. Indeed, it took me three readings before I was entirely sure it wasn’t some sort of elaborate put-on.
Alas, it’s not. Quinn, a Washington social maven with a spotty journalistic career and a marriage to former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, suggests that the best thing Barack Obama can do for his presidency is to spend more time (along with his family and his top staff) on the Washington social circuit.
To strengthen her argument, she conducts an amazing reinterpretation of the modern presidency to show that presidents who spurned the dinner-and-cocktail-party rituals of the Emerald City have gotten themselves into worlds of trouble. She suggests that Nixon’s and Clinton’s impeachments, Carter’s failure to get re-elected, and George W. Bush’s ultimate political decline all were significantly caused by the disdain they instilled amongst the local social lions (presumably like herself). This self-referential hallucination is bad enough as revisionist history. But that she would claim, and the very serious Post would publish, that at this particular moment in history Barack Obama isn’t spending enough time sucking up to the poohbahs of the hated capital city is bizarre beyond all reality.
The sad thing is that Quinn isn’t completely alone in her weird bubble. Mark Halperin of TIME, co-author of the endlessly discussed 2008 campaign book Game Change, recently wrote that one of Obama’s five biggest mistakes during his first year in office was insufficiently “wooing official Washington:”

[T]he First Couple and their top aides have shown no hankering for the Establishment seal of approval, nor have they accepted the glut of invitations to embassy parties and other tribal rituals of the political class. In the sphere of Washington glitter, the Clintons were clumsy and the Bush team indifferent, but the Obama Administration has turned a cold shoulder, disappointing Beltway salons and newsrooms whose denizens hoped the über-cool newbies would play.

Lord have mercy. Can’t disappoint those “Beltway salons and newsrooms,” can we?
I’ve never cared for the lefty blogospheric habit of referring to the chattering classes of Washington as “the Village,” implying as it does personal knowledge of the motives and characters of a very large and diverse bunch of total strangers. But if there is a Village, Sally Quinn is the mayor, and Halperin is one of her spokesmen.

This item is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
Many conservatives hoped last night’s State of the Union Address would represent something of a white flag from President Obama. Some progressives hoped for a fiery, “populist” attack on malefactors of great wealth. Others yearned for rhetorical enchantment, a speech that would redefine messy contemporary debates according to some previously unarticulated transcendent logic.
The president did none of those things. He essentially doubled down on the policy course he had already charted, made a serious effort to re-connect it to the original themes of his presidential campaign, and sought to brush back his critics a bit. In purely political terms, the speech seemed designed to halt the panic and infighting in Democratic ranks, kick some sand in the faces of increasingly smug and scornful Republicans, and obtain a fresh hearing from the public for decisions he made at the beginning of last year if not earlier. It was, as virtually every one I spoke to last night spontaneously observed, a very “Clintonian” effort, and not just because it was long and comprehensive. It strongly resembled a couple of those late 1990s Clinton SOTUs organized on the theme of “progress not partisanship,” loaded with data points supporting the sheer reasonableness of the administration agenda and the pettiness of (unnamed) conservative foes.
Substantively, the speech broke little new ground. But while such “concessions” to “conservative ideas” as highlighting business tax cuts in the jobs bill, or making nuclear energy development part of a “clean energy” strategy, were decided on some time ago, they were probably news to many non-beltway listeners.
All in all, Obama used the SOTU as a “teachable moment” to refresh some old but important arguments. And he did that well: his reminder of Bush’s responsibility for most of the budget problems facing the country was deftly done, in the context of accepting responsibility for what’s happened fiscally on his own watch. He rearticulated once again the economic rationale for his health care and climate change initiatives, a connection that was reinforced by the subordinate placement of these subjects in the speech. And he conducted something of a mini-tutorial on the budget, and cleared up most of the misunderstandings created by his staff’s use of the word “freeze” to describe a spending cap.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in the speech was his frontal attack on the five Supreme Court justices sitting a few yards from his podium, about the possible impact of last week’s Citizens United decision liberating corporate political spending. I only wish he could have amplified this section by quoting from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s many hymns of praise for this disturbing opinion as a giant blow for free speech.
And that gets to my only real criticism of this well-planned SOTU: a lot of it was in code. A number of the digs at Republicans were clear to people who watch Washington closely, but not so much to people who don’t. For example, the president was clearly taunting congressional Republicans when he said he’d be glad to consider any ideas they had that met his list of criteria for health care reform. To someone watching who didn’t know how ridiculous contemporary conservative “thinking” on health care has become, this may have sounded less like a criticism than like a decision to reopen the whole issue to many more months of wrangling in Congress, even as he tried to urge congressional Democrats to get the job done and not “run for the hills.”
Yes, the president has to walk a fine line in dealing with public and media perceptions that both parties are equally responsible for “partisanship” and gridlock. But at some point between now and November, he needs to better connect the dots, and explain exactly whose “partisanship” is an obstacle to “progress.”
UPDATE: Nate Silver did an analysis of “buzzwords” in Obama’s speech, comparing it to those of previous presidents at similar junctures in their administrations. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s most resembled those of Bill Clinton.

It’s a big ritual in politics for everyone with access to a camera, microphone or keyboard to “advise” the president on what he should say in each State of the Union address, and then more or less grade him the next day on how well he took said advice.
Since I doubt he’s actually surfing the web looking for speech ideas at this point, I won’t give him advice, but it is worth noting that he’s once again in a spot when a Great Speech would do him a world of good. At TNR, Jonathan Cohn suggests this is Obama’s biggest oratorical challenge since the famous “race speech” of 2008, when his candidacy for president looked to be seriously endangered by the appearance of toxic video snippets from sermons by his long-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Cohn goes on to outline the president’s unhappy situation:

Obama has to deal with impulses that are clearly at odds with one another–like the fact that the voters want more jobs but oppose deficit spending, which just happens to be the most effective way of reducing unemployment. When it comes to talking about the political process, Obama must somehow address the public’s frustration with gridlock and yearning for bipartisan outreach, even though Republican obstructionism has rendered Obama’s efforts at bipartisanship futile.

More immediately, the president has to deal with the likely reaction to whatever he says from conservatives who smell blood and think they have him, at long last, on the ropes, and progressives who are already bristling at his gestures on budget deficits, and/or angry at what they consider his lack of leadership, past and potentially present, on health reform.
Most observers are looking for signs of whether Obama will give short shrift to issues like health reform and climate change, and instead fully “pivot” to an economic message, populist, deficit-hawky, or some of both. Another possibility is that he will make a supreme and long-overdue effort to explain why, in fact, health reform and action on climate change, along with the bank regulations Republicans are sure to oppose, are critical to economic recovery. Maybe he’s already “lost” the public on that proposition, but there’s certainly no venue like the SOTU to make big and relatively complex arguments with a guarantee that he will be watched by many millions.
Cohn points out that in the “race” speech Obama confounded expectations by lifting the discussion from Wright’s comments to a general review of the complexities of racial discord in America. Taking a “higher path” and changing the terms of debate, if he can do that, would represent a significant presidential accomplishment tonight.
The one absolutely essential thing he must do, however much he continues to invite the violently oppositional GOP to cooperate with him, is to make it clear that conservatives do not now represent the “change” Americans voted for in 2008. Even if you think their resistance to Obama’s agenda is righteous, the prescriptions that pass for policy “alternatives” in GOP-land these days tend to fall into two baskets: the unserious and the ludicrous, with very few of them actually having the potential to be popular. You need not tie the GOP to George W. Bush to expose that fact: his Republican successors are rapidly making Bush look like a paragon of reasonableness.
It should be clear by now that an ideal SOTU would not only show some resolution and clarity in the administration’s course of action–along with some measured humility–thus reversing the current semi-panic in Democratic ranks, but would also begin to set the stage for the November elections by reminding Americans that they actually can’t magically wish away the country’s problems, and must instead choose between distinct alternatives. The more he casts light on those alternatives–not looking to the past to “blame Bush,” but to the future where real decisions must be made on a host of big challenges–the better his presidency, however halting its steps and difficult its path, will look. Since a clear majority of Americans still seem to admire this calm and intelligent man, they will give him their careful attention tonight, and perhaps he will again move them.

As a follow-up to J.P. Green’s post this morning suggesting that the DSCC is trying to split the right from the far right, it’s kind of important to understand that the far right is really feeling its oats these days, particularly in the Tea Party Movement.
But anyone trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon is constantly injured not to stereotype its participants politically or ideologically. It’s a grassroots movement, we are told, so no one in particular speaks for them. They hate both parties equally, it is said, so you can’t confuse them with conservative Republicans. There are former Obama voters in their ranks, we are told breathlessly.
Well, okay, after reading a long, impressionistic, nonjudgmental “life among the tea party activists” piece in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath, I won’t assume the author (after all, he’s writing for The New Yorker, at the very center of Wall Street/Liberal Enemy Camp, for God’s sake) gets the views of tea party activists accurately or fairly depicted. But it’s pretty clear that there are an awful lot of these folks who can only be described as harboring views considered, until just last year, about 90 degrees to the right of the right wing of the Republican Party. They are independent of the Republican Party only to the extent that they won’t support it fully until it moves further to the right another 90 degrees (which seems to be happening at a brisk pace).
Sure, there are probably all sorts of people in the mix, but here’s my question for them: please read the following passage from McGrath’s piece and tell me how much of this scenario sounds plausible to you:

An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

If you find yourself nodding your head at much of this stuff, then you are indeed living in a different conceptual world than I am, and I’m afraid I’ll have to stereotype you as a dangerous wingnut. Maybe a nice, patriotic, well-meaning wingnut, but a wingnut nonetheless.

By now you’ve probably heard of the bizarre comments by South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer–a candidate for the governorship later this year–over the weekend, wherein he compared people receiving food stamps or free school lunches to “stray animals” who think of little other than “breeding.” Bauer has expressed “regret” about the “stray animals” passage because stupid people took it as an “analogy, not a metaphor,” but has defended the underlying sentiments, and even attacked those who criticized his remarks for “cynicism.”
Bauer’s remarks weren’t in an off-the-record private conversation (like Harry Reid’s “light skin” comment about Barack Obama), and he didn’t commit a small, one-sentence gaffe that was taken out of context. No, Bauer was speaking in a “town hall” meeting with state legislators present, and the “stray animals” remarks was part of a fairly long, coherent (if evil) rant about the “culture of dependency,” the refusal of public assistance recipients to “give back” to the community, and the growing tendency of people to “vote for a living rather than work for a living.” He didn’t take any of that back in any way, shape or form.
And by and large his fellow South Carolina Republicans, many of whom really, really don’t like him, have gone to his defense, or at most suggested he made a “poor choice of words.” Nothing wrong, it appears, with suggesting that an actual majority of the population of his own state are folks who are ripping off taxpayers instead of working, and are “voting for a living” by supporting socialists like Barack Obama, so long as we all understand that comparing them to fast-breeding animals is a “metaphor, not an analogy.”
What this really represents is the growing radicalism of the Republican Party. It’s clearly advanced in South Carolina, where Bauer’s remarks are little more than a lurid version of the views of U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, who has suggested that the “culture of dependency” that Bauer talked about extends not only to people receiving food stamps, but those benefitting from Social Security and Medicare, and not only to parents whose kids eat subsidized school lunches, but parents who rely on “government schools” (better known as “public schools”) to begin with.
And beyond South Carolina, Bauer is also reflecting the narrative, beloved of the Tea Party movement and embraced in part by John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, that “looters” and “freeloaders” abetted by “radical” groups like ACORN blew up the economy by obtaining home mortgages they couldn’t afford, then demanded “bailouts” and elected their guy Obama president to introduce socialism.
How big a change is that in the views of Republicans? Lest we forget, the food stamp program, long beloved of Republican Members of Congress from farm states (most notably 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole), was designed to ensure that poor families could eat and didn’t get use up disposable income on more trivial expenditures. The school lunch program, which has never been controversial up until now, was based on the rather common-sense observation that hungry kids don’t learn very well, significantly reducing the likelihood that they would become productive members of society who could raise their own kids to be the same.
Moreover, listening to conservatives today rant about the “welfare entitlement” and those who refuse to “contribute to society,” you’d never know that Republicans just over a decade ago were boasting endlessly about a federal welfare reform initiative that eliminated any unconditional entitlement to public assistance and introduced work requirements and time limits. It didn’t go away in the years since 1997.
Unfortunately, Andre Bauer reflects some pretty scary trends within the Republican Party. And those Republicans who don’t want to be understood as favoring a dehumanization of poor people and minorities and conspiracy theories about welfare looters “voting for a living,” have a responsibility to denounce utterances like Bauer’s as something a bit more serious than a “poor choice of words.” How about a poor choice of morals, and a poor grasp of their own country?

If you are interested in a deeper interpretation of what’s been happening in and to the Obama administration–deeper, that is, than conservative allegations of “radicalism” and “socialism” and progressive complaints about “spinelessness” or “corporate influence”–then I highly recommend a colloquoy on The American Prospect site between TAP’s Mark Schmitt and historian Rick Perlstein. It’s in essence a lookback at the simmering debate among progressive observers that ran all through the 2008 election cycle about Barack Obama’s “theory of change,” and especially the tension between his progressive goals and his rhetoric of bipartisanship.
As it happens, Schmitt (along with Michael Tomasky and yours truly) was highly identified with the argument that Obama’s “theory of change” was aimed at offering the political opposition a choice between cooperation on progressive policy initiatives or self-isolation through obstruction and extremism. In other words, in a country unhappy with partisan gridlock, Republicans would either go along with key elements of a progressive agenda, or shrink themselves into an ever-more-extreme ideological rump that was irrelevant to the direction of the country.
Rick Perlstein was more of an Obama-skeptic, but he, too, began to feel that Obama might be luring Republicans into a big trap. As he recalls now, during the stretch drive in 2008:

Conservatives eagerly played to type — GOP congressional leaders called in Joe the Plumber for strategy sessions, and Newsmax.com started advertising a 2009 “Hot Sarah Calendar.” On my blog I labeled what Republicans had been reduced to as “Palinporn”: “material to help lonely conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to govern the country.” It was a very “Obama theory of change” insight: Obama could simply get on with governing. Republicans would conversely build ever more elaborate halls of mirrors that made it increasingly impossible for them to speak to America. In fact, around that time, I was exhilarated by the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s ratings exploding through the roof, from 20 million to 30 million listeners — 30 million Americans able only to speak to each other, sounding to the rest of the country like practitioners of esoteric Masonic rites.

Today, of course, Republicans haven’t gotten any less extreme–au contraire in fact–but their political prospects, for 2010 at least, look pretty good. What went wrong? Was Obama’s “theory of change” fundamentally flawed, making him look weak and unprincipled when talking about “bipartisanship?” Would Democrats have done better under the leadership of someone whose theory of change was based on “fighting” or constituency-tending?
You can read the whole piece, but both Schmitt and Perlstein agree that Obama underestimated the ability of Republicans to achieve almost total solidarity against the new administration, and overestimated his own ability to maintain the strong and excited coalition he put together in 2008, given the excrutiatingly difficult circumstances he face upon taking office. Moreover, they agree that going forward, Obama must find ways to “draw lines” with the Republican opposition without trying to abandon his natural style and tone. To put it another way, they suggest that Obama’s “theory of change” required, in practice, a more aggressive approach than trap-setting and jiu-jitsu. The strategy isn’t just falling into place naturally.
What I would add to their analysis is that this “line-drawing” should focus more on the present and future than the past. Yes, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of the country’s current problems and even many of the policies that Obama was more or less forced to continue. Yes, Obama inherited two wars, vast long-term budget deficits, and an economic nightmare, and he should remind people of that now and then. But inevitably, fairly or not, with every day that passes more Americans will hold the current administration responsible for current conditions in the country. Moreover, what the “blame Bush” narrative misses is that Republicans have in no small part insulated themselves from responsibility for his record by moving harshly to the Right, implicitly criticizing Bush for not being a “true conservative,” and in particular, attacking the steps he took to head off a global economic collapse, which are deeply unpopular. And focusing on Bush distracts attention from the extremism, craziness and emptiness (depending on the issue) or the post-Bush Republican Party, which ought to be the source of comparison for voters this year and in 2012. Without an aggressive, presidentially-led effort to expose that extremism, you can’t really expect political independents to look past the mainstream media’s inveterate tendency to assume the political “center” is half-way between wherever the two parties happen to be at any moment, and to blame both parties equally for the climate of “partisanship” (or maybe blame Obama even more, since he was supposed to be “post-partisan”).
Presenting a choice not just to Republicans, but to voters, of two distinct courses in American politics and policy is the best chance the president and the Democratic Party has of negotiating the current climate, re-energizing the 2012 coalition, and eventually, getting a clear mandate for progressive governance that will include public support for overcoming Republican obstruction, especially in the Senate.
Obama’s “theory of change” hasn’t been refuted, just immensely complicated, and there’s no compelling evidence that a different strategy of dealing with a public wanting conflicting things, an opposition party that’s gone nihilistic, and the built-in obstructions to change in our system, would have worked better. But at some point, the theory has to be adjusted to current realities and past mistakes, and get visible results. Otherwise, the spectacle of the post-partisan president getting attacked for “socialism” while trimming his own policy sails and begging the opposition for cooperation really will look just feckless.

The news that the president is going to propose a three-year “freeze” on appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs (with veterans and homeland security programs exempted) is creating a lot of consternation among progressives today.
But folded into this consternation is a significant amount of confusion. The term “budget freeze,” long the default-drive Republican fiscal austerity “idea,” usually connotes an across-the-board flatlining of spending in non-exempt accounts, a total commitment to the budgetary status quo that neatly allows its proponents to avoid separating sheep from goats and offending any constituency for any particular program. If that’s what Obama was proposing, it would indeed be inconsistent with any new jobs initiative, or indeed, with key elements of the “middle-class relief” agenda the administration just announced. But that’s not what he is proposing; it is instead really an overall spending “cap” under which specific programs could be increased or decreased, presumably depdending on their usefullness in creating jobs or other worthy social goods. It’s an approach that Bill Clinton, back in 1992, called “cut and invest.”
Since it’s Congress, not the administration, that will actually make appropriations decisions, and since Members of Congress and the committees they chair which often serve as the most powerful constituencies for programs with little real justification, it can definitely be argued that any real “freeze” would look more like the across-the-board variety (indeed, that’s what happened to Clinton’s “cut and invest” budget when Congress got its hands on it in 1993). Alternatively, it can be argued that the whole thing is mainly rhetorical, given public concerns about government spending.
But in conjunction with the president’s push for a bipartisan “deficit commission” that would be emppwered to make recommendations on long-term budget savings that would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, the “freeze” proposal, whatever it actually means, will definitely upset progressives fearing that Obama is “going Hoover” in economic policy. And make no mistake, there’s one objection to the “freeze” idea that’s not based on confusion: if you really do believe that the federal government needs to be running larger short-term deficits in order to provide Keynsian stiimulus to consumer demand, then any domestic spending limits, however selective in application, will strike you as a very bad approach.