WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama expanded his fledgling search for Republican allies on a possible deficit-reduction bargain when he hosted lunch yesterday for Paul Ryan, one of the House of Representatives’ leading fiscal conservatives.
Obama’s new engagement with opposition members of Congress, something not seen during his first term as president, is “a hopeful sign. I think something will come of it,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters.
In often acrimonious talks, Obama and Boehner, an Ohio Republican, failed over the past two years to reach a long-term deal to trim at least $4,000bn in deficits over 10 years.
Trying a new tack, Obama took a dozen Senate Republicans to dinner on Wednesday to launch a dialogue he hopes might end with a broad deal to reduce deficits.
Obama yesterday lunched at the White House with Ryan of Wisconsin, who spent much of last year bashing the Democratic president’s fiscal policies when Ryan was the Republican vice presidential candidate.
Having lost November’s election to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Ryan has resumed his job as chairman of the House Budget Committee, where he is in a position to chart his party’s course on fiscal policy.
Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who joined Obama and Ryan at the White House lunch, said: “The more avenues of communication you have open, the more opportunity there is to resolve differences. Obviously, it’s no guarantee that we’ll get there, but you’re guaranteed not to get there if you don’t have these conversations going.”
Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on House Budget Committee, spoke in an interview on MSNBC just ahead of the lunch.
Next week, Ryan and his Senate Democratic counterpart, Patty Murray, will float competing budget blueprints for 2014 that could become the platform for Obama to negotiate an elusive “grand bargain” for significant deficit reduction over the next decade.
In recent days, some prominent Republicans, such as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, have expressed an openness to tax increases to help control annual deficits contributing to a national debt that has skyrocketed to $16.7 trillion.
Reuters
