Hayes in The Nation talks about the progressive anger at this game of thinking that the government is giving money away to the wrong constituents, when in reality it's the elderly and security (war funding) where most of the government gives over the bread.  It reminds me of a class I taught years back at a New Mexico college where some kid (whose father was pure right wing ideology) stood up and made a speech about how welfare to undeserving minorities was ruining the country. Welfare queens with Cadillacs in the garage! This has played too long and too well, and to have Obama now contemplating the same game is a bit chilling. Sure, let's let people starve who need food stamps in order to survive. Anyone who lives on a fixed (SS) income is surely aware of months when whether one will survive a rough month becomes a palpable fear. If there is to come a movement during this period of absolute polarity between the two parties it will have to come from the unemployed, people losing homes, and the sluggishly in need of progressive viewpoints mass of people. Kucinich and Sanders have some awareness of these things, but I am not sure Obama's circle does. While it may be true that FDR had a personal charisma to move the nation past its Depression in the 30s, somebody in the current government needs to call attention to the suffering that is becoming a calamity for so much of the US.  BP

Christopher Hayes 1-26-10 (The Nation)

But let me talk about the politics. I'm sure that in the short term it polls well. Most voters don't have a great grasp of what makes up the federal budget and the fact that about two-thirds of what the government does is security and social insurance for the elderly. Thanks to decades of right-wing attacks on Big Government, many people think that most of what the government spends money on are things like food stamps and foreign aid. That's why this is so inexcusably insidious: because it uses the full power of the bully pulpit to reaffirm and endorse a kind of ignorance that the right-wing has spent years stoking, and in so doing further erodes what little conceptual and rhetorical foundation we have domestically for social democracy. It may be a head fake, the fine print may basically have a lot of loopholes, in which case the policy itself won't be terrible, but again it reinforces the enemy's narrative: that government spends too much on "programs," that defense and "security" spending doesn't count for the deficit and that times of economic misery and widespread unemployment the solution is fiscal austerity. I wish there was a way to sue for political malpractice, because what we're seeing from the White House and congressional Democrats these last two weeks would make for a depressingly good case.