Obama’s 2013 budget a campaign call to arms

•  Budget a political football in election year
• Obama to propose $4 trillion in deficit cuts
• No details likely on $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts

By Alister Bull

WASHINGTON (Reuters) :When President Barack Obama unveils his annual budget next month, the blueprint will reveal a lot about his re-election strategy but probably little about the spending and tax policies the U.S. Congress will adopt in the coming year.

Obama’s budget for the 2013 fiscal year will be declared “dead on arrival” in a gridlocked Congress, where lawmakers who control the U.S. purse strings are focused squarely on their own campaigns and the contest for the White House in November 2012.

House of Representatives Republicans, who spent much of last year locked in combat with Obama over fiscal policy, are relishing the budget’s release - expected in early February - as another chance to skewer the president as a big spender and the architect of bloated U.S. deficits and a soaring national debt.

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the race to become the Republican presidential nominee who will challenge Obama in the Nov. 6 election, has said it is not “moral” for the United States to keep spending more than it is taking in and has called for a balanced budget.

The last time the United States balanced its budget was under Democrat Bill Clinton, who presided over a booming economy in the 1990s and left office in 2001 with a $128 billion surplus. Democrats lambaste his successor, George W. Bush, for plunging the country into deficit through costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and huge tax cuts.

As both sides wrestle for control of the narrative over who is to blame for the huge deficits and how best to slash them, the White House will likely use the budget to try to gain advantage over Republicans in the debate.

Analysts expect Obama to renew his call for an end to the Bush-era tax cuts for wealthier Americans that are due to expire in December. That will be a red flag for Republicans, who say higher taxes - even on the rich - will stifle economic growth.

“What the president will be providing in his budget will be more of a campaign document than it will be a real budget,” said

Stan Collender, a former congressional budget aide who is now a partner at Qorvis Communications.

Republican resistance to Obama’s budget may play right into a new White House strategy to highlight the “obstructionism” of an unpopular Congress.

The thinking goes that Republican rejection of the budget would help Obama harden his credentials as a fighter for the middle class while enabling him to paint his opponents as the party of the rich.

“The president’s budget will reflect his values of making sure that the wealthiest pay their fair share,” a White House official told Reuters. The official declined to give specifics of the budget proposal.

The administration is expected to use the budget to try to cast Obama as a leader willing to tackle the nation’s fiscal woes by reviving his long-term deficit-cutting plan, which he first proposed to a congressional panel last September.

The administration describes it as a “go-big” plan to tame spiraling debt, but critics say it is thin on specifics.

The plan, which went nowhere after the deficit-reduction talks collapsed, would cut $4 trillion over 10 years, with higher taxes on the wealthy offsetting near-term stimulus spending.

“This is a proposal that is out there, that continues to be part of a package of proposals that the president would like to see implemented,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

The White House wants to blunt Republican attacks that the U.S. national debt under Obama has swollen by $5 trillion, to a total of $15 trillion, an issue opinion polls consistently show is a major worry for voters and could hurt Obama’s chances of re-election.