This column by Zakaria expresses exactly what I was trying to get at when I tweeted earlier in the week that Dems were too reflexively dismissing the proposal as evil.
The great opening:
It was fateful that Paul Ryan released his budget plan the same week Barack Obama launched his re-election campaign — because we will now see what matters most to Obama.
The President has talked passionately and consistently about the need to tackle the country's problems, act like grownups, do the hard things and win the future. But he has also skipped every opportunity to say how he'd tackle the gigantic problem of entitlements. Ryan's plan is deeply flawed, but it is courageous. It should prompt the President to say, in effect, "You're right about the problem. You're wrong about the solution. And here's how I would accomplish the same goal by more humane and responsible means." That would be the beginning of a great national conversation.
He then goes into the problems with Ryan's proposal, which are significant, but listen up to the larger logic:
So why do I applaud the Ryan plan? Because it is a serious effort to tackle entitlement programs, even though any discussion of cuts in these programs — which are inevitable and unavoidable — could be political suicide. If Democrats don't like his budget ideas, they should propose their own — presumably without tax cuts and with stronger protections for Medicare and Medicaid and deeper reductions in defense spending. But they, too, must face up to the fiscal reality. The Government Accountability Office concludes that America faces a "fiscal gap" of $99.4 trillion over the next 75 years, which would mean we would have to increase taxes by 50% or reduce spending by 35% simply to stop accumulating more debt. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will together make up 50% of the federal budget by 2021.
Zakaria ends by saying Obama can do the obvious thing and just gin up the attack ads, or he can actually lead.
I go back and forth on the man. I don't like the caretaker vibe he gives off at times, but then I like his rightsizing of the job at certain moments - like the way he handled Libya in the end (a negotiating process I did not enjoy, and yet, I had to admire the outcome).
But the budget thing, because of the commitments he's made, defines his presidency by far. Iraq and Afghanistan were, quite frankly, already on a trajectory before he showed up. You can say the financial/fiscal crises were too, but I liked the choices he made there. It's just that those choices pushed us all down the path toward some tough decisions we had long put off and felt we could still put off. Now those decisions seem definitive concerning our future leadership of this world. We can continue to feed this global narrative of our decline, or we can seek to arrest it.