“Here’s yet another deadline, and everyone’s telling us everything will be destroyed if we go past it,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducted the poll. “It’s very hard to get the same sense of urgency for a third time in a row, just two months after the last one.”
The fight is displaying Washington at its worst — all accusations and finger-pointing, no real attempts at problem-solving. Both sides have plans, but the president is spending far more energy explaining why the sequester is the Republicans’ fault, and how bad the consequences of those cuts will be, than he is trying to negotiate something that would stop it.
“It really is sad. The president’s stock in trade is political games, and this is another political game he’s playing,” Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., vice chairman of the House Budget Committee, told ABC News. “It results in greater cynicism on the part of the public, and none of the things he’s saying are true. And people recognize this — it’s 2-and-a-half cents on every dollar.”
Price said the president is exaggerating the impact of cuts that amount to less than 2.5 percent of federal spending — an estimated $85 billion this year, out of a federal budget in the neighborhood of $3.5 trillion.
Moreover, Price said, the public will wind up blaming the president — notwithstanding polling that suggests the opposite for now. While many Republicans are on record preferring alternatives to the across-the-board cuts, they also argue that the president could mitigate their impact if he so chose.
