Obama Blasts Republican Budget Plan as ‘Radical Vision’ for the Nation
President Obama delivered a stern and stinging rebuke of the Republican vision for the country Tuesday, castigating the GOP as a “radical” party that has strayed so far from the political middle that its policies represent an affront to core American values.
Singling out GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney for the first time, Obama sought to lump all Republicans under an ideological umbrella that, he argued, has shifted far from the days of the party’s more moderate icons such as Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Reagan, he said, would be unelectable in the modern Republican Party.
Speaking to the American Society of News Editors, President Obama slammed the Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) budget and the proposed tax breaks for America’s wealthiest citizens.
Obama said the House Republican budget plan, which has been endorsed by Romney and would slash entitlements and agency spending, is “so far to the right” on the political spectrum that it makes the Republicans’ 1994 Contract With America “look like the New Deal.”
“This isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party,” Obama said. “This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they’re running on.”
Mocking Romney for calling the House budget “marvelous,” the president added that the plan, which aims to trim $5.3 trillion from federal spending over the next decade, would create a form of “social Darwinism” pitting the poor against the wealthy.
“It’s a Trojan horse,” he declared in an address to news editors in Washington. “Disguised as a deficit-reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. . . . It’s a prescription for decline.”