SHUTDOWN AVERTED

Federal shutdown avoided, 2012 budget fight looms YAHOO = window.YAHOO {}; YAHOO.Media = YAHOO.Media {}; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons = YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons {}; (function(){ var o_facebook_iframe_url="http://l.yimg.com/b/social_buttons/facebook-share-iframe.php?u={url}&t={title}"; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons.conf = { tracking: { _S: 8903239, pkg: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/ap_on_re_us\/us_spending_showdown", intl: 'us', lang: 'en-US', ct:'a' }, content: { url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/ap_on_re_us\/us_spending_showdown", title: "Federal+shutdown+avoided%2C+2012+budget+fight+looms+-+Yahoo%21+News", mail_locale: "us", mail_property: "news", mail_meta: "&h1=ap/ap_on_re_us/us_spending_showdown&h2=T&h3=519", print_url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/ap_on_re_us\/us_spending_showdown\/print" }, c Analysis: So much for change coming to Washington YAHOO = window.YAHOO {}; YAHOO.Media = YAHOO.Media {}; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons = YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons {}; (function(){ var o_facebook_iframe_url="http://l.yimg.com/b/social_buttons/facebook-share-iframe.php?u={url}&t={title}"; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons.conf = { tracking: { _S: 85115982, pkg: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", intl: 'us', lang: 'en-US', ct:'a' }, content: { url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", title: "Analysis%3A+So+much+for+change+coming+to+Washington+-+Yahoo%21+News", mail_locale: "us", mail_property: "news", mail_meta: "&h1=ap/20110409/ap_on_an/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis&h2=T&h3=2282", print_url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis\/print" }, config: { facebook_iframe_url: o_facebook_iframe_url } }; })(); Share retweet Email Print AP – President Barack Obama waves after visiting the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, April 9, 2011, in Washington. … Play Video Video:President Obama and John Boehner Seal Budget Deal ABC News Play Video Video:Raw Video: Obama visits Lincoln Memorial AP Play Video Video:GOP Address: Spending crisis still looms AP By BEN FELLER, AP White House Correspondent Ben Feller, Ap White House Correspondent – Sat Apr 9, 7:57 pm ET WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised to change Washington's ways. Yet he's as caught up in them as ever. As the week began, Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a sunny video of people talking about their hopes and needs, the very image of life outside Washington politics. By week's end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to stave off a government shutdown that could only undermine the public's faith in his leadership. It was the messy business of governing, and how it's going to be in this long campaign for incumbent Obama. Beyond the vision for economic competitiveness he wants to talk about, Obama is chasing a second term while trying to make a deeply divided government work. He got bogged down in legislative tactics in his first two years, even when he won fights on health care and other issues. The goal now is to avoid all that. He can't. In this test of leadership, the White House says Obama wrangled the budget compromise he wanted, spending cuts he supported without shelving his priorities or accepting unacceptable policy changes. His administration portrayed it as an example of bipartisan cooperation of the highest stakes. Yet the government was on the brink of closing, and many people were wondering how that could happen, or why. This is change? The showdown was a reminder that for all a president's powers, there's much beyond control. Think Libya, Egypt, Japan's earthquake, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. In this case, the new House Republican majority, led by Speaker John Boehner, seized on a must-pass budget bill to give voice to frustrated voters and tea party conservatives who demanded spending cuts. It was brinksmanship mode again in the capital, where nothing gets done until the deadline. Sometimes not even then. In public, Obama tried to keep it at arm's length. "I shouldn't have to oversee a process in which Congress deals with last year's budget," Obama said as the time got short this week. In fact, he was up to his neck in it. Obama used a veto threat to make clear he would not accept the scope of GOP spending cuts. He said he would accept no more temporary extensions to keep the government running for a few weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. He kept saying leaders had to act like grown-ups. The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That type of role provided an opening for Republicans to question his leadership. It also led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own party who wanted the president to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted. The White House figured it would take those hits. It did. A Gallup poll in late March found declining numbers of people who said Obama was a strong and decisive leader: a little more than half of those polled, compared with 60 percent one year ago and 73 percent two years ago. The White House believed that a better result would come if Obama didn't try to overheat the issue. Officials believed that people were worried about gas prices, not a spending squabble and that voters didn't hire Obama to be a legislator. Obama would go public when it meant the most. That was Tuesday. The president suddenly got vocal. He said Americans didn't want games but results. The pragmatic approach is what White House strategists believe will bring back the election-turning independents to Obama. "There are some things we can't control," he said. "We can't control earthquakes; we can't control tsunamis; we can't control uprisings on the other side of the world. What we can control is our capacity to have a reasoned, fair conversation between the parties and get the business of the American people done." But it wasn't getting done, and his voice was not the only one setting the tone. "The president isn't leading," Boehner said Wednesday. "He didn't lead on last year's budget, and he clearly is not leading on this year's budget." Obama met with Boehner and Reid four times in the White House during the week. He still went to the Philadelphia area Wednesday to talk about energy. He looked comfortable, almost carefree, as he laughed with workers at a wind-turbine company about their families and their cars. But Washington had sucked him back in. By Friday, he canceled a trip to Indianapolis, scrapping the attention he wanted to give to clean energy. He scrapped a weekend getaway with his family to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While working to avoid a shutdown, Obama's team thought the White House would come out OK in the public's mind if it came to that. The thinking was that the president had presented a reasonable case of agreeing to spending cuts without going too far, and that people would be angry with Republicans if the government closed up partially over a policy disagreement about abortion. Only when the standoff grew most dire did it end. But the budget mess showed how government isn't supposed to operate. No matter who's to blame, all will be, including a president running for election this time from inside Washington's ways. Analysis: So much for change coming to Washington YAHOO = window.YAHOO {}; YAHOO.Media = YAHOO.Media {}; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons = YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons {}; (function(){ var o_facebook_iframe_url="http://l.yimg.com/b/social_buttons/facebook-share-iframe.php?u={url}&t={title}"; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons.conf = { tracking: { _S: 85115982, pkg: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", intl: 'us', lang: 'en-US', ct:'a' }, content: { url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", title: "Analysis%3A+So+much+for+change+coming+to+Washington+-+Yahoo%21+News", mail_locale: "us", mail_property: "news", mail_meta: "&h1=ap/20110409/ap_on_an/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis&h2=T&h3=2282", print_url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis\/print" }, config: { facebook_iframe_url: o_facebook_iframe_url } }; })(); Share retweet Email Print AP – President Barack Obama waves after visiting the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, April 9, 2011, in Washington. … Play Video Video:President Obama and John Boehner Seal Budget Deal ABC News Play Video Video:Raw Video: Obama visits Lincoln Memorial AP Play Video Video:GOP Address: Spending crisis still looms AP By BEN FELLER, AP White House Correspondent Ben Feller, Ap White House Correspondent – Sat Apr 9, 7:57 pm ET WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised to change Washington's ways. Yet he's as caught up in them as ever. As the week began, Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a sunny video of people talking about their hopes and needs, the very image of life outside Washington politics. By week's end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to stave off a government shutdown that could only undermine the public's faith in his leadership. It was the messy business of governing, and how it's going to be in this long campaign for incumbent Obama. Beyond the vision for economic competitiveness he wants to talk about, Obama is chasing a second term while trying to make a deeply divided government work. He got bogged down in legislative tactics in his first two years, even when he won fights on health care and other issues. The goal now is to avoid all that. He can't. In this test of leadership, the White House says Obama wrangled the budget compromise he wanted, spending cuts he supported without shelving his priorities or accepting unacceptable policy changes. His administration portrayed it as an example of bipartisan cooperation of the highest stakes. Yet the government was on the brink of closing, and many people were wondering how that could happen, or why. This is change? The showdown was a reminder that for all a president's powers, there's much beyond control. Think Libya, Egypt, Japan's earthquake, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. In this case, the new House Republican majority, led by Speaker John Boehner, seized on a must-pass budget bill to give voice to frustrated voters and tea party conservatives who demanded spending cuts. It was brinksmanship mode again in the capital, where nothing gets done until the deadline. Sometimes not even then. In public, Obama tried to keep it at arm's length. "I shouldn't have to oversee a process in which Congress deals with last year's budget," Obama said as the time got short this week. In fact, he was up to his neck in it. Obama used a veto threat to make clear he would not accept the scope of GOP spending cuts. He said he would accept no more temporary extensions to keep the government running for a few weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. He kept saying leaders had to act like grown-ups. The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That type of role provided an opening for Republicans to question his leadership. It also led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own party who wanted the president to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted. The White House figured it would take those hits. It did. A Gallup poll in late March found declining numbers of people who said Obama was a strong and decisive leader: a little more than half of those polled, compared with 60 percent one year ago and 73 percent two years ago. The White House believed that a better result would come if Obama didn't try to overheat the issue. Officials believed that people were worried about gas prices, not a spending squabble and that voters didn't hire Obama to be a legislator. Obama would go public when it meant the most. That was Tuesday. The president suddenly got vocal. He said Americans didn't want games but results. The pragmatic approach is what White House strategists believe will bring back the election-turning independents to Obama. "There are some things we can't control," he said. "We can't control earthquakes; we can't control tsunamis; we can't control uprisings on the other side of the world. What we can control is our capacity to have a reasoned, fair conversation between the parties and get the business of the American people done." But it wasn't getting done, and his voice was not the only one setting the tone. "The president isn't leading," Boehner said Wednesday. "He didn't lead on last year's budget, and he clearly is not leading on this year's budget." Obama met with Boehner and Reid four times in the White House during the week. He still went to the Philadelphia area Wednesday to talk about energy. He looked comfortable, almost carefree, as he laughed with workers at a wind-turbine company about their families and their cars. But Washington had sucked him back in. By Friday, he canceled a trip to Indianapolis, scrapping the attention he wanted to give to clean energy. He scrapped a weekend getaway with his family to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While working to avoid a shutdown, Obama's team thought the White House would come out OK in the public's mind if it came to that. The thinking was that the president had presented a reasonable case of agreeing to spending cuts without going too far, and that people would be angry with Republicans if the government closed up partially over a policy disagreement about abortion. Only when the standoff grew most dire did it end. But the budget mess showed how government isn't supposed to operate. No matter who's to blame, all will be, including a president running for election this time from inside Washington's ways. onfig: { facebook_iframe_url: o_facebook_iframe_url } }; })(); Share retweet Email Print AP – President Obama poses for photographers in the Blue Room at the White House in Washington after he spoke … Play Video Video:Government Shutdown Averted: Obama Announces Deal ABC News Play Video Video:Government Shutdown Avoided ABC News Play Video Video:Planned Parenthood and the budget fight AP By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press – Sat Apr 9, 9:16 am ET WASHINGTON – A last-minute budget deal forged amid bluster and tough bargaining averted an embarrassing federal shutdown, cut billions in spending and provided the first major test of the divided government that voters ushered in five months ago. Working late into Friday night, congressional and White House negotiators finally agreed on a plan to pay for government operations through the end of September while trimming $38.5 billion in spending. Lawmakers then approved a measure to keep the government running for a few more days while the details of the new spending plan are written into legislation. Actual approval of the deal is expected in the middle of next week. "Americans of different beliefs came together again," President Barack Obama said from the White House Blue Room, a setting chosen to offer a clear view of the Washington Monument over his right shoulder. The agreement was negotiated by Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The administration was poised to shutter federal services, from national parks to tax-season help centers, and to send furlough notices to hundreds of thousands of federal workers. All sides insisted they wanted to avoid that outcome, which at times seemed inevitable. Shortly after midnight, White House budget director Jacob Lew issued a memo instructing departments and agencies to continue normal operations. Boehner said the deal came after "a lot of discussion and a long fight." He won an ovation from his rank and file, including the new tea party adherents whose victories last November shifted control of the House to the GOP. Reid declared the deal "historic." The deal marked the end of a three-way clash of wills. It also set the tone for coming confrontations over raising the government's borrowing limit, the spending plan for the budget year that begins Oct. 1 and long-term deficit reduction. In the end, all sides claimed victory. For Republicans, it was the sheer size of the spending cuts. For Obama and Reid, it was casting aside GOP policy initiatives that would have blocked environmental rules and changed a program that provides family planning services. Not all policy provisions were struck. One in the final deal would ban the use of federal or local government funds to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia. A program dear to Boehner that lets District of Columbia students use federally funded vouchers to attend private schools also survived. Republicans had included language to deny federal money to put in place Obama's year-old health care law. The deal only requires such a proposal to be voted on by the Democratic-controlled Senate, where it is certain to fall short of the necessary 60 votes. The deal came together after six grueling weeks as negotiators virtually dared each other to shut down the government. Boehner faced pressure from his GOP colleagues to stick as closely possible to the $61 billion in cuts and the conservative policy positions that the House had passed. At one point, Democrats announced negotiators had locked into a spending cut figure — $33 billion. Boehner pushed back and said there was no deal. During a meeting at the White House this past week, Boehner said he wanted $40 billion. The final number fell just short of that. In one dramatic moment, Obama called Boehner on Friday morning after learning that the outline of a deal they had reached with Reid in the Oval Office the night before was not reflected in the pre-dawn staff negotiations. The whole package was in peril. According to a senior administration official, Obama told Boehner that they were the two most consequential leaders and if they had any hope of keeping the government open, their bargain had to be honored and could not be altered by staff. The official described the scene on condition of anonymity to reveal behind-the-scenes negotiations. The accomplishment set the stage for even tougher confrontations. House Republicans intend to pass a 2012 budget in the coming week that calls for sweeping changes in the Medicare and Medicaid health programs and even deeper cuts in domestic programs to gain control over soaring deficits. In the Republican radio address, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., warned of a coming crisis. "Unless we act soon, government spending on health and retirement programs will crowd out spending on everything else, including national security. It will literally take every cent of every federal tax dollar just to pay for these programs," Ryan said Saturday. That debate could come soon. The Treasury has told Congress it must vote to raise the debt limit by summer. Republicans hope to use this issue to force Obama to accept long-term deficit-reduction measures. ____ Associated Press writers David Espo, Andrew Taylor, Erica Werner, Julie Pace and Ben Feller contributed to this story. ___ Online: Obama weekly address: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_re_us/storytext/us_spending_showdown/41020567/SIG=10s7oir5b/*http://www.whitehouse.gov/ GOP address: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_re_us/storytext/us_spending_showdown/41020567/SIG=11dd369tp/*http://www.youtube.com/republicanconference Analysis: So much for change coming to Washington YAHOO = window.YAHOO {}; YAHOO.Media = YAHOO.Media {}; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons = YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons {}; (function(){ var o_facebook_iframe_url="http://l.yimg.com/b/social_buttons/facebook-share-iframe.php?u={url}&t={title}"; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons.conf = { tracking: { _S: 85115982, pkg: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", intl: 'us', lang: 'en-US', ct:'a' }, content: { url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis", title: "Analysis%3A+So+much+for+change+coming+to+Washington+-+Yahoo%21+News", mail_locale: "us", mail_property: "news", mail_meta: "&h1=ap/20110409/ap_on_an/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis&h2=T&h3=2282", print_url: "http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20110409\/ap_on_an\/us_obama_a_test_of_leadership_analysis\/print" }, config: { facebook_iframe_url: o_facebook_iframe_url } }; })(); Share retweet Email Print AP – President Barack Obama waves after visiting the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, April 9, 2011, in Washington. … Play Video Video:President Obama and John Boehner Seal Budget Deal ABC News Play Video Video:Raw Video: Obama visits Lincoln Memorial AP Play Video Video:GOP Address: Spending crisis still looms AP By BEN FELLER, AP White House Correspondent Ben Feller, Ap White House Correspondent – Sat Apr 9, 7:57 pm ET WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised to change Washington's ways. Yet he's as caught up in them as ever. As the week began, Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a sunny video of people talking about their hopes and needs, the very image of life outside Washington politics. By week's end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to stave off a government shutdown that could only undermine the public's faith in his leadership. It was the messy business of governing, and how it's going to be in this long campaign for incumbent Obama. Beyond the vision for economic competitiveness he wants to talk about, Obama is chasing a second term while trying to make a deeply divided government work. He got bogged down in legislative tactics in his first two years, even when he won fights on health care and other issues. The goal now is to avoid all that. He can't. In this test of leadership, the White House says Obama wrangled the budget compromise he wanted, spending cuts he supported without shelving his priorities or accepting unacceptable policy changes. His administration portrayed it as an example of bipartisan cooperation of the highest stakes. Yet the government was on the brink of closing, and many people were wondering how that could happen, or why. This is change? The showdown was a reminder that for all a president's powers, there's much beyond control. Think Libya, Egypt, Japan's earthquake, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. In this case, the new House Republican majority, led by Speaker John Boehner, seized on a must-pass budget bill to give voice to frustrated voters and tea party conservatives who demanded spending cuts. It was brinksmanship mode again in the capital, where nothing gets done until the deadline. Sometimes not even then. In public, Obama tried to keep it at arm's length. "I shouldn't have to oversee a process in which Congress deals with last year's budget," Obama said as the time got short this week. In fact, he was up to his neck in it. Obama used a veto threat to make clear he would not accept the scope of GOP spending cuts. He said he would accept no more temporary extensions to keep the government running for a few weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. He kept saying leaders had to act like grown-ups. The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That type of role provided an opening for Republicans to question his leadership. It also led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own party who wanted the president to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted. The White House figured it would take those hits. It did. A Gallup poll in late March found declining numbers of people who said Obama was a strong and decisive leader: a little more than half of those polled, compared with 60 percent one year ago and 73 percent two years ago. The White House believed that a better result would come if Obama didn't try to overheat the issue. Officials believed that people were worried about gas prices, not a spending squabble and that voters didn't hire Obama to be a legislator. Obama would go public when it meant the most. That was Tuesday. The president suddenly got vocal. He said Americans didn't want games but results. The pragmatic approach is what White House strategists believe will bring back the election-turning independents to Obama. "There are some things we can't control," he said. "We can't control earthquakes; we can't control tsunamis; we can't control uprisings on the other side of the world. What we can control is our capacity to have a reasoned, fair conversation between the parties and get the business of the American people done." But it wasn't getting done, and his voice was not the only one setting the tone. "The president isn't leading," Boehner said Wednesday. "He didn't lead on last year's budget, and he clearly is not leading on this year's budget." Obama met with Boehner and Reid four times in the White House during the week. He still went to the Philadelphia area Wednesday to talk about energy. He looked comfortable, almost carefree, as he laughed with workers at a wind-turbine company about their families and their cars. But Washington had sucked him back in. By Friday, he canceled a trip to Indianapolis, scrapping the attention he wanted to give to clean energy. He scrapped a weekend getaway with his family to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While working to avoid a shutdown, Obama's team thought the White House would come out OK in the public's mind if it came to that. The thinking was that the president had presented a reasonable case of agreeing to spending cuts without going too far, and that people would be angry with Republicans if the government closed up partially over a policy disagreement about abortion. Only when the standoff grew most dire did it end. But the budget mess showed how government isn't supposed to operate. No matter who's to blame, all will be, including a president running for election this time from inside Washington's ways. HE DEALT WITH THE REALITY SUPERIMPOSED ON HIM SKILLFULLY IN THE BEST WAY HE COULD. PRAGMATISM SUPERCEDED THE THREAT OF A SUPERVENING IDEOLOGY COME WHAT MAY. WISDOM WAS GENERATED BY THE PREIDENT BUT NOT INVOLVEMENT IN A NO WIN TUG OF WAR OF OPPOSING INTERESTS BUT EXERTING A WINNING EDGE OF PRAGMATISM AND EXHORTATION WHICH GOT THE JOB DONE OF COMPROMISE WITH OUT THE EMOTIONALISM OF OBNOXIOUS IDEOLOGY WHEREIN SUPREME LEADERSHIP WITH NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ODDS OF BEING IN CONTROL BUT NOT OBVIOUS CONTROL. IT IS CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED IN THE CHAIN OF EVENTS AND THE SEEMINGLY AD HOS RESPONSES OF THE PRESIDENT, YET IN CONTROL OF THE EVENTS.