Obama's Budget Ploy: Damage GOP

Most critics of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal have chided him for being unwilling to take on the vital issue of entitlements – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But this was a deliberate decision, so that Republicans would have to take the politically dangerous step of being the first to propose entitlement cuts, Politico reports.

As many Democrats see it, Obama has set the Republicans up for a fall, trying to exploit the party’s split between conservatives who seek serious cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and the GOP leadership, which is reluctant to tamper with retirement benefits Americans regard as a sacred right.

“They are suckers,” one senior Democratic congressional aide says of House GOP plans to release the first comprehensive plan to cut entitlement spending. “They have painted themselves into a corner.”