The rival budgets laid out this week by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan and his Senate counterpart Patty Murray are almost perfectly calculated to mock establishment dreams of a grand bargain. Murray’s Democratic budget completely eschews the structural cuts in entitlement programs that Republicans and bargainers demand, while Ryan’s GOP plan avoids any hint of higher tax revenues and almost laughs at the idea that the 2012 election should have any consequences. Democrats would respond to 30 years of rising inequality by taxing the rich to pay for the health care, retirement, and education needs of the bottom two-thirds. Republicans would supercharge growth by taxing the rich less and downsizing the safety net, giving everyone stronger incentives to work and earn for themselves.

Ryan’s budget is almost frighteningly ambitious. It purports to balance the budget in 10 years. It transforms Medicare into a voucher program over 20 years. It undoes the Affordable Care Act. It removes the federal “floor” from state Medicaid benefits. It cuts food stamps and Pell Grants. It rescinds a key element of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill and would radically alter American housing policy. It initiates a massive transformation of the tax code, cutting the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and making up for the difference with unspecified loophole-closing. Descriptions of Ryan as a “courageous” thinker are overblown. At key moments, his relies on magic asterisks and punts to other committees for clear thinking. It’s a class-war budget on behalf of the rich, keeping their taxes low and making the poor and the middle-class pay. But it certainly reflects the old saw about making no small plans.

Murray’s budget for the Democrats is the reverse. In distributive terms, she taxes the rich to preserve programs for the poor and middle-class. But it’s also the reverse conceptually—a de minimis scheme aimed at addressing the budget challenge with as little change as possible.

It’s conventional to score budget proposals over a 10-year time horizon, and so Murray’s plan is designed to produce a low and stable budget deficit within that window. It doesn’t balance the budget, since the budget doesn’t really need to be balanced. It doesn’t really address the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security outside that 10-year window, because what’s outside the window doesn’t really need to be addressed. It doesn’t transform the tax code. It bites at the lowest-hanging fruit of deductions for the wealthy and big businesses. And it doesn’t transform any programs, nipping and tucking just enough to hit deficit reduction targets while being equally balanced between tax hikes and spending cuts.

The surprise when comparing the House Republicans’ budget and the Senate Democrats’ budget is just how much more conservative the Democratic effort is. I don’t mean ideologically conservative, of course. I mean conservative in the sense that the dictionary defines it: “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.”

There is little in the federal government Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) does not confidently propose to remake. Medicare becomes a voucher system in which we trust government regulators to keep private insurers in line. Medicaid and food stamps are handed over to the states. The tax code is flattened to two brackets. Ideologically speaking, these are very conservative decisions. But in the dictionary sense, they are anything but conservative decisions: Ryan’s budget is almost entirely about upending existing institutions, and his assumed savings reflect an extraordinary confidence that untested reforms will prove wildly successful.

Sen. Patty Murray’s budget, by contrast, is both a more liberal and a more traditionally conservative document. Where Ryan sees the deficit as an opportunity for historic change, Murray treats it as an economic problem that requires a modest set of spending cuts and tax increases to solve. Where Ryan’s proposed deficit-reduction path is fast and severe, Murray moves slowly and cautiously. Where Ryan wants to remake the state and balance the budget, Murray just wants to stabilize and reduce the debt.

But even given that difference in objective, Murray’s budget is deeply, even excessively, respectful of existing institutions. If the problem of Ryan’s budget is that it wants to do far too much, the problem with Murray’s budget is that it is almost entirely devoted to saying what it won’t do, and it gets very vague when the topic turns to what it will.

For the Washington Post and ABC News, the key takeaway from their new national poll is apparently supposed to be President Obama's declining fortunes. The Post's lede reads, "The afterglow of President Obama's reelection and inauguration appears to have vanished."

And in a literal sense, that's true. On Election Day 2012, when Obama won by 5 million votes and earned 332 electoral votes, the president had a 50/46 approval/disapproval rating, and in today's poll, he once again has a 50/46 approval/disapproval rating. He got a bump earlier in the year, which has since gone away.

But I thought it'd be worthwhile to put together a chart showing the approval ratings for Washington's major players.

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But for goodness sakes, 72% of the country -- 72% -- disapprove of congressional Republicans. Among self-identified moderates, it's 81% -- and the poll was taken before the House Republican budget, which hopes to scrap Medicare and give millionaires another tax break, was released. What's more, GOP lawmakers receive the bulk of the blame for the sequestration fiasco.

If the political world is going to focus on "vanishing" levels of public support, to focus on the president, who remains relatively popular, is to miss what matters most.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appeared on one of the Sunday shows yesterday, and seemed a little too eager to repeat one talking point, ad nauseum. See if you can pick up on the subtlety of his message:

"The question is are we going to keep the commitment we made to the American people a year and a half ago, a bipartisan agreement signed by the president, that we would reduce spending without raising taxes by this amount of money in this fiscal year?

"And here we are, a year and a half later, with the president trying to walk away from the commitment we made to the American people.... We've got to begin to cut spending. And we promised the American people we'd do it a year and a half ago and we're going to do it. ...

"I'm absolutely confident we're going to reduce spending the amount of money that we promised the American people we would in a law the president signed a year and a half ago."

Over the course of a not-terribly-long interview, McConnell said eight times that the sequester has to be replaced with a 100%-to-0% deal in Republicans' favor because -- you guessed it -- it was a "commitment" Republicans made "to the American people."

The battle over the sequester has sparked a corollary argument over the proper role of pundits in assigning blame in political standoffs of this type. A number of us have argued that the facts plainly reveal that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and Democrats for the current crisis. The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset.

Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I’ve called the “centrist dodge” — have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)

We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.
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The argument now is basically that the president is the father who must make his problem children behave. Only this is worse than just a dodge. Lots and lots of people are going to get hurt by the sequester. Anyone who helps deflect blame from Republicans — in the full knowledge that they are the primary obstacle to the compromise we need to prevent serious damage from being done to the country — is unwittingly helping to enable their intransigence.

To anticipate 99 percent of incoming hostile mail and online trollery: the point of this distillation is not what it says about the two political parties. You can reverse them if you want -- although in the struggle over "the sequester," I think it's right as is. The real point is what this says about the predicament and habits of the press.

So it goes with The Price of Politics. Critics have complained about the tediousness of this latest Woodward volume, which focuses mostly on the debt-ceiling negotiations between the White House and Republicans during the summer of 2011. The reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post point out that the ground has been tilled by a succession of other writers, most exhaustively by Matt Bai of The New York Times. But I didn’t find Woodward’s book unusually tedious. In fact, I learned a lot from it. What I found it to be was remarkably slanted.

This was all the more jarring because Woodward is famous for his distinct lack of slant. His books are scrupulously reported but annoyingly literal. At their worst, they read more like stenography than fully hatched stories. The only hint of a worldview he injects is the worldview of the establishment. He reflexively flatters the powerful.

So in one sense the book is a departure: it is relentlessly biased against the president. Woodward argues that the White House and Congress failed to reach a major deficit-reduction deal last summer because Obama didn’t provide the necessary leadership, even though this thesis is untethered from Woodward’s own reporting, to say nothing of reality.

But, in another sense, the book is perfectly in sync with Woodward’s oeuvre. There is a body of respectable Washington opinion that considers Obama unworthy of the presidency: he hadn’t put in his time before running, didn’t grasp the majesty of the office, evinced no respect for the way things were done. He not only won without courting the city’s elders, he had the bad manners to keep his distance even after winning. This is the view Woodward distills.