WASHINGTON: Both President Barack Obama and his Republican foes have now wagered huge bets on apparently irreconcilable tax and deficit policies that promise to define the 2012 election.
Obama, with a $447 billion jobs bill, and a new bid to raise taxes on the rich by $1.5 trillion to cut the deficit, is banking on Americans to buy into his vision for an activist government to lead them into better economic times.
"This is not class warfare, it is math," an impassioned Obama said Monday.
"We can't just cut our way out of this hole. It is only right we ask everyone to pay their fair share," he argued.
Top Republicans in Congress have concluded however that after three years of economic misery, voters have soured on government spending to boost growth and will recoil from a "class warfare" president seeking re-election.
Senior Obama aides say privately they hope to push Republicans into a corner where they must choose between recession-weary Americans and protecting millionaires, billionaires and corporate jet owners from higher taxes.
If, by the end of this year Republicans who run the House of Representatives refuse to compromise by passing the jobs plan and by taking a "balanced" approach to the deficit -- code for accepting some tax increases -- then voters will have a clear choice, the aides said.
The White House is hoping that Congress's approval rating in the low teens -- some 30 percent lower than the president in some polls -- will taint Republican presidential candidates by association.
It will also have been heartened by the sight of Democrats rallying round Obama's plan Monday, following whispers that the president's political base is disgruntled after his failed previous efforts to compromise with Republicans.
"The president has a winning hand, and he's going all in," Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer said, praising Obama's mix of spending cuts and tax hikes for the richest Americans designed to trim the deficit by $3.0 trillion.
"I believe the American people are so strongly with us," he said.
But Republicans, consumed by a presidential primary campaign electrified by the anti-government, anti-spending fervor of the Tea Party movement, also scent political advantage.
Party leaders who attacked Obama as a big spending liberal on the way to a mid-term election win last year, quickly rejected his deficit plan.
"Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership," said Republican House Speaker John Boehner.
Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, also opposed the initiative, which means Obama's plan faces daunting odds in both chambers.
But according to most evidence, Obama has the polls on his side.
Sixty-three percent in a CNN poll last month wanted a congressional supercommittee charged with finding deficit cuts to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and businesses and was in line with most surveys on the issue.
However, Obama repeatedly railed against the Bush tax cuts in the mid-term elections last year and still saw Democrats pay the price for high unemployment and an economic recovery many in the heartland have yet to feel.
And going into a general election as a candidate calling for higher taxes would be a leap political of faith for the president -- especially a Democrat.
"Fundamentally, Americans don't like raising taxes on anybody. This is likely to be no exception," said Costas Panagopoulos, an elections specialist at Fordham University, New York.
"The risk Obama faces is being branded as a tax and spend liberal."
Republicans fault his plan to let tax cuts for higher earners introduced by former president George W. Bush expire.
The move could result in higher taxes for individuals earning $200,000 and families earning $250,000 a year -- people who are certainly well off but who many aspirational Americans may still consider middle class.
Republicans also argue that ending those tax cuts will drain confidence from the business sector, slow demand and harm small and medium-size enterprises that create jobs.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a rising Republican star, previewed 2012 attacks on the president on Monday in an emailed fundraising appeal.
"What (Obama) failed to mention when he unveiled his spending-disguised-as-'jobs'-plan to the American people? $1.5 trillion in new taxes!"
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011
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