Doing what we sent him to do?

Yesterday, in his weekly Saturday morning address, President Obama pronounced himself to be preparing for a massive battle with the entrenched corporate interests of the energy, health care, and education industries. This, in the same week that he nominated a key arms-control expert to oversee the Pentagon's weapons procurement, a position that is subject to intense lobbying by defense contractors including Raytheon, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas and others. Weapons procurement doesn't sound like the sexiest or most controversial area of government, but Fred Kaplan of Slate.com provides a glimpse of the difficulties in cutting defense spending through the example of the highest-profile military purchase in some time: the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Read it and weep.

There will be no movement back to fiscal sanity and deficit-cutting without cutting programs and increasing government revenues through closing tax loopholes and reversing tax cuts for selected industries that would continue to do quite well without them (i.e. the energy sector). Obama's first budget aims to accomplish many of these goals, and his efforts will be opposed vigorously by those industries affected and by their defenders in Congress who benefit from corporate largesse in the form of campaign contributions. These are big battles to be waged on many fronts, and the fact that Obama is putting the nation on notice about his intentions to wage those battles appear to me to point to cojones we can believe in. I am personally excited to see where this goes.