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Guardian
Barack Obama delivered a grim warning to the nation's governors at the White House on Monday about the impact of across-the-board spending cuts if Congress fails to find a deal by Friday's deadline.Obama urged the governors, many of them Republicans, to put pressure on their congressional colleagues this week. But a deal by Friday appears increasingly unlikely, with no negotiations even underway between the two sides.
With no deal in place, $85bn in spending cuts will begin to kick in, about half from the Pentagon and the rest from domestic spending. These will have knock-on effects on teaching jobs, health programmes, air travel and hundreds of other areas funded by the federal government.
Obama, addressing the governors in Washington for their annual conference, said: "The last thing you want to see is Washington get in the way of progress. Unfortunately, in just four days, Congress is poised to allow a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts to kick in that will slow our economy, eliminate good jobs and leave a lot of folks who are already pretty thinly stretched scrambling to figure out what to do."
Talking Points Memo
If it appears to you that Democrats are approaching the Friday sequestration deadline with greater poise than the GOP, you’re not mistaken.Democrats enjoy a massive public relations advantage over the GOP. Voters are prepared to blame Republicans. The Democrats have an unusually steady message. Republicans are lurching from message to message as they try futilely to blame Obama for sequestration’s very existence, while contending that its consequences won’t be so dire (except when they contend it will hollow out the military) and to argue just as futilely that Obama’s revenue demand is an act of duplicity.
But Democrats are also confident because they have an institutional memory of winning a similar fight, when Republicans shut down the government in 1995.
“Before the government shutdown it was very much an open question in most people’s minds which party would win,” recalled Paul Begala, a Clinton White House veteran, and an insider at the time of the shutdown, in a telephone interview Friday. “Republicans were very confident at the time that the government would shutdown and people’s lives wouldn’t change. They were wrong. … [W]e all saw that theory proved in ‘95 and ‘96 and it’s going to happen again.”