Obama Says G.O.P. Budget Plan Embodies ‘Radical Vision’

By MARK LANDLER
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama opened a full-frontal assault Tuesday on the federal budget adopted by House Republicans, condemning it as a “Trojan horse” that would greatly deepen inequality in the United States, and painting it as the manifesto of a party that had swung radically to the right.

Listing what he said would be draconian cuts to college scholarships, medical research, national parks and even weather forecasts, Mr. Obama said the Republican budget was “so far to the right, it makes the Contract With America” — Newt Gingrich’s legislative insurgency of 1994 — “look like the New Deal.”

Mr. Obama’s scathing attack, in a lunchtime speech to editors and reporters from The Associated Press, was part of a broad indictment of the Republican Party that included the president’s likely opponent in the fall, Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney, the president said, praised a previous version of the Republican budget as “marvelous.” In a dig at his challenger’s upper-crust vocabulary, Mr. Obama noted that marvelous “is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to a budget; it’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”

(More here.)