The first Obama budget

Andrew Leonard on today’s budget announcement:

The size, goals, and funding strategies for the new budget ensure a political battle of monstrous proportions. And in retrospect, it clarifies the Obama administration’s strategy on the stimulus package. Suppose the administration had pushed for a much bigger stimulus package, along the lines of what some progressives were arguing for. Many progressives actively wanted to provoke a Republican filibuster, as a show of strength and an opportunity to shame the GOP publicly as obstructionists. But why provoke that kind of fight in your first weeks of office, if what you’ve got in your back pocket is a budget proposal bigger, more expensive, and more fundamentally transformative of the United States’ economy than anything proposed by a Democrat or Republican since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society?

The White House was saving its bullets for the real fight. And it is on.

Update: Robert Reich on Obama’s budget:

President Obama’s new budget is, well, audacious — not just because it includes several big, audacious initiatives (universally affordable health care, and a cap-and-trade system for coping with global warming, for starters) but also because it represents the biggest redistribution of income from the wealthy to the middle class and poor this nation has seen in more than forty years.