The degree of the political problem that President Obama’s “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” approach to health care reform has caused the ruling party in Washington, D.C. is beginning to become clear from some comments made by cognoscenti of the Democratic Party.

A gray-beard of the liberal establishment, Richard Cohen, wrote today in the Washington Post that the most apt comparison to President Obama is President Jimmy Carter. Ouch!

With regard to the health care debate, Cohen writes:

In the end, the success of the health care reform effort comes down to trust. A lesson of the raucous town-hall meetings is the sense of panic, the fear that this man in the White House does not appreciate the anxiety that middle-class Americans fear about health care — whether they will keep what they have, whether they will have enough or whether their last years will be spent in painful, degrading poverty….

More and more Obama is being likened to Lyndon Johnson, with Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam. Maybe. But the better analogy is to Jimmy Carter, particularly the president analyzed by James Fallows in a 1979 Atlantic magazine article, “The Passionless Presidency.” “The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself,” Fallows wrote. And what is the central idea of the Obama presidency? It is change. And what is that? It is Obama himself.

Unlike Carter, Obama brims with energy and charm. His brilliance is not brittle but supple. Yet, another teachable moment is upon him and he seems lost. The country needs health care reform and a success in Afghanistan, and both efforts are going in the wrong direction. The message needs to be fixed and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.

Just how badly has the Democratic health reform effort failed? Democratic Senator Feingold (WI) is predicting no health care bill before Christmas, and when he said the most likely outcome is nothing being done at all, he was met with cheers from the voters at his town hall meeting.

As the Lakeland Times reports:

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That’s what White House Budget Director Peter Orszag had to say about the Congressional Budget Office’s latest statement that “the probability is high that no [health care] savings would be realized” by creating yet another federal board to oversee the federal government’s $33 trillion Medicare mess.

Here’s what Orszag said:

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.)

That’s right: Orszag, President Barack Obama’s hand-picked budgetary whiz, is highlighting an admission by CBO that cutting payments to doctors accepting Medicare patients would result in lower government spending on health care.

Of course, the fact that the few remaining physicians who accept Medicare patients would drop these already-unprofitable clients as a result (something already happening in cities and states around the country as a result of the low reimbursement rates and regular governmental failure to pay on time) doesn’t matter here. After all, it’s just the numbers that matter.

You know — numbers. Like the ones the bureaucrats running the public option’s cost-effectiveness spreadsheets will be entirely relying on to determine whether or not you’ll be allowed to get that tonsillectomy, chemotherapy, or heart operation this year (or ever).**

Ah, sweet numbers. Because on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, we all look the same.

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As Erick points out, Obamacare took another heavy shot today, as the CBO concluded that the much-vaunted reforms pushed by Democratrs to control Medicare costs would have little or no effect. OMB Director Orszag has fired back quickly however, in an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade. He says that while CBO may have little faith in the provisions as they are currently drafted, a few little tweaks can make a world of difference:

With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings.  (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.)

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Of course, worrying about something and doing something about it are two very different things. But do you suppose Peter Orszag would be getting a grilling about the massive loopholes in PayGo if they weren’t worried about losing seats in 2010?

During the House Budget Committee hearing, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) noted the exemptions will cost more than $3 trillion over 10 years. Policies that won’t be subject to pay-go restrictions under Obama’s bill include the extension of middle-class tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, funds to keep the Alternative Minimum Tax from hitting middle-income Americans and Medicare payments to physicians…

Orszag said items were exempted because neither lawmakers nor the White House have come up with ways to pay for them. Those policies also have broad support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

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Wonderful reporting today in the Politico by David Rogers. Basically, The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, wants to change the rules for the way that government tells Congress and the American people how much money it spends at the IMF. Orszag, is claiming that a $100 billion dollars check that we send to the IMF should be reported as $0. Zero. Nothing. Really.

Yet if all this IMF money were added to the president’s $83.4 billion supplemental request, it would more than double in size — even if it would be no more costly to taxpayers in direct spending.

For this reason, no one is eager to step forward with a budget amendment. And Orszag argues that it would be better to treat the whole transaction as an exchange of assets with the IMF — and not as spending at all.

This “exchange of assets” is because we get “special drawing rights” on IMF reserves in exchange for our money, nicely explained here by The Economist magazine. These are the “currency” of the IMF  that is used to bail out countries.

This is a cow-patty gimmick. Remember those? The kind that Barack Obama said he didn’t do? Recall that he claimed that he fully funded the war in the budget. This money is to be authorized via a supplemental. For the war. Which wasn’t fully funded by the budget.

This isn’t transparency. This isn’t honesty. This is a lie. This is $100b in added deficit this year, however important, that Obama and Orszag don’t want to tell the American people about.

David Rogers deserves a big thank you from the American people for shining a light on this.

Update: Jake Tapper notes that it was one year ago this week that then-Sen. Obama (D-IL) “swooped in from the campaign trail to — along with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — vote for an amendment to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks for fiscal year 2009.” What a difference a year and a change in power makes, eh?

I will “eliminate” earmarks that have “no legitimate public purpose” from bills that cross my desk! declared President Obama today at a White House press availability held to announce his intent to sign an $410,000,000,000.00 omnibus spending bill containing 9,000 earmarks with no legitimate public purpose.

Congressional earmarks should be posted on lawmakers’ websites “so the public and the press can examine them and judge their merit for themselves,” Obama said, adding that each earmark request should “be open to scrutiny at public hearings, where members will have to justify their expense to the taxpayer.”

Pork-filled bills like this “will not happen when the president has the full legislative and appropriations process in place,” said OMB head Peter Orszag on CNN. (When the president has the full legislative apparatus in place? Last I checked, that was a bit of a different branch of government than the one Mr. Obama “leads”….)

“I don’t think the White House has the ability to tell us what to do,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who has apparently been living in a cave since November 4, 2008, as he appears to have missed the fact that Hope and Change have come to Washington, and that opposing the President’s will on any count means being anti-American and hoping your country fails (because as we all know, now that it’s a Democrat in the White House, “if the president fails, the country fails“).

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“The Audacity of Hype.” An excerpt:

Continuing the tradition he established back when he was Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget has started a blog. I applaud this move if — if — it is meant to promote transparency. But while Orszag is a smart man and a formidable policy player, his blog appears to be more determined to spin than it is to enlighten.

Read it all for a discussion of Administration tax policy. For as we all know, delving deeply into tax policy is the ultimate thrill.