By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog 

Congressional Republicans, while welcoming President Barack Obama's offer of a televised summit on healthcare, are refusing to be led around by the nose. House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor are asking the president to agree to set aside the healthcare legislation pending in Congress and to start over again as a condition of their participation in the proposed February 25 meeting. 

"Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over so that we can develop a bill that is truly worthy of the support and confidence of the American people?" the pair asked in a letter sent Monday to the White House. "If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate." Indeed, the GOP upped the stakes by asking the president to include Democrats who voted against the bill in the summit as well as governors and state legislators and, in fact, daring him to have a truly national dialogue on this volatile issue. 

It may be that the Republicans are on the verge of showing President Barack Obama a way out of the healthcare mess he has made for himself.

Up until the election of Republican Scott Brown to a seat in the United States Senate, the Democrats on Capitol Hill had largely been negotiating with themselves over what the final version of the healthcare bill would look like. They had the votes to pass it without the GOP but they didn't have the will--so the legislation was left to linger while the president talked tough about not running away from it.

All that changed after Obama, who was back to calling it "health insurance reform"--a phrase which polls better than healthcare reform--turned in a better than expected performance during the question and answer session that followed his remarks to the House Republicans, meeting in Baltimore.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

As my bloleague John A. Farrell wrote here Wednesday, there are a few things in President Barack Obama's FY 2011 budget proposal worth saluting. Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the good. Obama and the Democrats in Congress have proposed an increase in the federal debt limit of $1.9 trillion--or just over $6,500 per person--making it the largest debt limit increase in U.S. history. And, points out House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, that's on top of two other increases in the debt limit in the past 12 months that total $1.079 trillion.

If that were not enough, an analysis prepared by the nonpartisan National Taxpayers' Union Foundation says Obama's budget document is loaded with "recycled program cuts," "tax hikes masquerading as spending cuts," and "spending hikes masquerading as tax cuts."

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama bragged that his administration had not raised taxes, contrary to what its opponents had alleged. "We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college," he said, adding, "And we haven't raised income taxes by a single dime on a single person. Not a single dime."

Leaving aside the need for fact-checking--the validity of the president's assertion hinges on just what constitutes a cut in taxes--the president's $3.8 trillion budget for the upcoming fiscal year turns that statement on its head, even by the White House's own estimates. Released to the public Monday, the Obama budget as proposed increases taxes by more than $2 trillion over 10 years, without taking into account the potential impact on revenues if the cap and trade energy tax ever passes. With "cap and tax"--as its opponents call it--the tax burden in the budget would be even higher.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The conventional wisdom, following the Republican victories in the 2009 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial contests and in the Massachusetts special election for the United States Senate seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy, is that the American electorate is hungry for change. But, like the change that Barack Obama promised during the 2008 presidential campaign, it is a change that is so far undefined, ambiguous, perhaps even inconsistent, differing from state to state and race to race.

Beyond the sense that some portion of the electorate--most visibly but not exclusively defined by the tea party movement--has adopted a "throw the bums out mentality," the only thing that can really be said about this hunger for change is that the voters want something different than what they've got because what they've got, in their minds at least, isn't working.

After Tuesday, when both the Republicans and Democrats go to the polls in Illinois, we may have a better idea of where things are headed.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The Obama administration has seemed somewhat indecisive of late about key elements of the war on terror. It was not a subject that received a great deal of attention in his remarks to the Congress Wednesday night but it is a subject that is very much on the minds of everyone else. "In the wake of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, defending the country from future terrorist attacks," the Pew Research Center said in a report released earlier this week, remains a top priority for the American people.

Obama referenced aspects of the war on terror just a handful of times, giving it about the same degree of attention as he gave to the use of the filibuster by Senate Republicans and to upbraiding members of the United States Supreme Court over their recent decision regarding campaign finance laws and the First Amendment.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

If President Barack Obama had a hard time with the State of the Union Wednesday night--if it made him seem small or did not come across well in every place--it is because his predecessor is such a hard act to follow. By predecessor I don't mean George W. Bush--who famously remarked that his lips were the place that words went to die--but Barack Obama the candidate, whose masterful delivery of soaring rhetoric propelled him past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and into the White House.

Obama was weakest at those points during the speech in which he was forced to defend his own actions and to talk about specifics. Or, if you prefer, when he had to talk like a president and not a candidate for office. In several places he appeared bogged down in the details of the policies he was announcing, when it was not so easy to draw contrasts or to present things as a choice between competing visions.