Washington – President Bush promised Wednesday to produce a plan to balance the federal budget in five years and challenged lawmakers to slash their special pet projects in half next year, embracing priorities of the new Democratic leadership that will assume control of Congress today.
Appearing in the Rose Garden with his Cabinet, Bush said he has been encouraged by meetings with Democrats and thinks they can reach common ground on spending issues that have bitterly divided them for six years.
He said the budget proposal he will make Feb. 5 will erase the deficit by 2012, and he called on Congress “to end the dead-of- the-night” process in which earmarks are slipped into spending bills.
The president’s announcements were greeted by Democrats as “me-tooism,” as one senior leadership aide put it, that closely tracked goals outlined by the new majority.
The incoming House and Senate budget committee chairmen have set 2012 as a target for balancing the budget, and the incoming House and Senate appropriations chairmen have decided to freeze earmarks this year and introduce further restrictions on such spending items, which are often called “pork.”
In trying to adopt such ambitions as his own, Bush hopes to regain the initiative after his party lost Congress in November and to counter his reputation as a president who took a budget surplus and turned it into record deficits, analysts said.
Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year.
But now, for the first time since he took office, both parties have set a mutual target for eliminating the deficit, an implicit agreement that raises the profile of the issue and may create a political imperative that prods the two sides to find ways to meet the goal or be held accountable for failing.
“It’s time to set aside politics and focus on the future,” Bush said.
The parties remain far apart, however, on how to get there, with Bush insisting Wednesday that his tax cuts be made permanent and Democrats laying the groundwork for reversing some of those for the wealthiest taxpayers.
Democrats responded to Bush’s comments with deep skepticism.
“It’s real hard to look at the man’s record and take him seriously on these issues,” Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the incoming budget committee chairman, said in an interview. “He’s got a lot to prove. Talk is cheap.”
Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council and an aide to former President Clinton, said Bush must abandon some red-line positions to reach genuine agreement with Congress.
“For Bush to announce that he shares Democrats’ willingness to cut the deficit by 2012 doesn’t mean a heck of a lot if he’s ruling out any of the ways that Democrats want to get there,” he said.
