President Obama and Rick Perry are both headed to Pittsburgh this week -- not, I suspect, to sample a Primanti's sammich, as we homies like to call the gustatory tests of manhood that combine, meat, cheese, coleslaw AND french fries between two hearty slabs of Italian bread.

A tougher test of manhood awaits Obama and the Texas governor who wants to oust him from the White House when they talk about jobs in a city that has lost so many of them. Tuesday, Obama touts his jobs bill at a union training center. On Friday, it will be Perry's turn to unveil his jobs plan. Both have them have picked the right venue -- if they are willing to grapple with the hard truths that Pittsburgh represents. But those can be harder to swallow than a kolbassi with provolone from Primanti Brothers.

MONTREAL -- So far as performances go, America is bombing, even in a city like Montreal, where, in the heat of the summer, things are quite chill and composed.

Some of the busiest streets downtown are closed because Montreal hosts a comedy festival each summer. And no one honks their horns.

But all the talk among American visitors is about fear and the decline of their country. And that's just from the American comedians. (At his Juste Pour Rire performance, Greg Proops got huge laughs when he noted that, for this particular gig, he's OK with being paid in loonies, not in American dollars, for once).

The comedians also made fun of America's tendency to make lists of winners and losers.

Here it doesn't really matter who won or lost. The Daily Show's John Oliver urged America to spend another $3 trillion because, really, what's the difference between $14.3 trillion and any other number? American political leaders pretended that all they had was a little spat and that everyone has come together and is sharing in a triumphal agreement to... well, we'll find out when a commission tells us down the road.

From National Journal:
Scenes From the Iowa Straw Poll

Governor Pawlenty vs. Candidate Pawlenty

Obama Owns the Economy - Or Not?

POLL: Obama Hits New Low In Gallup Survey

PICTURES: GOPers Love Babies, But Babies Are Still Undecided

And sometimes there aren't any obvious winners or losers. You can make the case that President Obama got what he needed -- the chance to fight another day for his political priorities. Unfortunately, he'll be able to do so only if he is reelected.

It's a big if. Obama was left with no leverage in this fight, other than the potential threat of a default weighing on the minds of more responsible Republicans. He warned that Republicans wouldn't give him an inch, because that's not what Republicans do, and that's certainly not what they were elected in 2010 to do.

He didn't build a strong personal relationship with Speaker John Boehner until the mating season was almost finished. How could Obama assume Republicans would act like adults with him while he refused to build the type of bond he'd need with Boehner to make it count if they did?

Obama assumed the economy would be better -- better to the point where spending would no longer drive the political narrative. But the economy remains distressingly sluggish. And the markets, it turned out, weren't nearly as helpful to Obama as he might have thought they would be. Not the bond markets. Not the "Asian markets," which kind of knew that their debtors wouldn't dare default. Not the stock market. (A few days of decline in some indices does not a threat make.)

Boehner is widely regarded as a loser. But that's like expecting the new principal of a school full of misfits to bring in the highest test scores. Boehner knew what he had ahead of him when he took the job -- a determined freshman class that wouldn't follow his rules, only its principles -- and he did what he could. He got the best deal he could have gotten given that Republicans control one half of Congress. If you put yourself in the shoes of Republicans circa 2008 and ask them whether they'd take this deal, they'd accuse you of being ridiculously naïve and optimistic.

Mitch McConnell acted like Mitch McConnell. The House Republicans do not butter his bread and never did, and expecting him to act like them was unreasonable. He is a smart guy. It is not surprising he saw the endgame first.

In private, Obama's advisers talk about bringing the Democrats in from the cold, realigning their policy proprieties to fit their demographic base and the realities of modern politics. It used to be that voters really didn't care about spending -- they only said they did. It was an accepted way of railing against some messy social policy, usually.

But since the government charged two wars on credit, the housing market went bust, and the banks were bailed out -- to the people who vote, spending really started to mean something.

Obama's (reelection) base has to like the deal, and the president will spend a lot of time patiently explaining to his party why its economic platform suddenly seems a lot more Republican than it used to.

Americans like to say that our democratic experiment is messy but better than any other system ever conceived. As American stand-up comedian Colin Quinn sees it, the worst system ever conceived is a dictatorship. There, you get one choice. In America, you get two choices. So the best system ever conceived is the worst system -- plus one?

That's a humorist's license and even trite; in the past, those two choices have been sufficiently malleable to account for broad ideological coalitions that fit whatever divided America at the time.

But today, those two choices seem like the worst political system ever conceived -- plus one. Not just to the world. But to Americans, too.

At least when they're outside the country.

Mitt Romney may have hit his stride as the front-running Republican challenger following Friday's dismal jobs report, blasting President Obama not only for failing to turn around the economy but for his "indifference.''

That's a whack right to the president's gut, encompassing his biggest liabilities in a re-election campaign, even from the perspective of the people who voted for him.

Obama himself acknowledged Wednesday in a Twitter town hall meeting that he failed to anticipate the "magnitude of the recession.'' What's more, he frequently fails to convey that he's really upset about it.

That's a dangerous combination of failures and a potentially winning campaign message for Romney.

Unfortunately for Romney, he looks like the wrong messenger.

He's a former corporate executive who made a fortune in leveraged buyouts, a man who always looks as if his clothes came straight from the dry cleaner, and an awkward campaigner who has flip-flopped on some key issues. On Wednesday, the day after a campaign fundraiser at a prestigious mansion in London, the former Massachusetts governor tweeted a photo of a parlor-side tete-a-tete with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

That's a discordant image at a time when so many Americans can barely keep a roof over their heads, and it reflects Romney's continuing struggle to forge a connection with voters.

As for Obama's biggest challenge, his wobbly standing with the independent voters who are the key to his re-election was laid bare Friday in a report from the Republican polling and consulting group, Resurgent Republic.

Independents don't blame Obama for the state of the economy and they generally like him. But they question his spending policies and his leadership and they don't think relief is in sight, the firm concluded after leading focus groups in the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Colorado.

Ed Gillespie, a member of the firm's board of directors, described a "very sour, pessimistic mindset'' even among voters sympathetic to Obama.

"That should be disconcerting and troubling to the White House,'' he told reporters at a gathering Friday sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. "The notion that he may be over his head is emerging,''

Any suggestion from the White House that the economic crisis is lifting sounds "like nails on a chalkboard'' to these voters, he added.

Romney has smartly seized on any nail-like noises coming from the administration, mocking Obama's description of "bumps on the road to recovery,'' and doggedly pushing the slogan "Obama isn't working.'' On Friday he sought to capitalize on comments by White House advisor David Plouffe, who said, "The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers. People won't vote based on the unemployment rate, they're going to vote based on: 'How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?'"

Romney seized on the first part of the quote and ignored the second part, declaring "If David Plouffe were working for me, I would fire him and then he could experience firsthand the pain of unemployment.''

A potent message coming from a flawed messenger.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a (not necessarily) single man in possession of a good fortune - and political power -- must be in want of a wife. But not exclusively.

This variation on Jane Austen's masterful opening of Pride and Prejudice came to mind in recent days during what seems like an endless procession of male politicos accused of, to varying degrees, sexual misconduct.

Senate investigators found evidence that former Nevada Sen. John Ensign broke the law when he tried to cover up an extramarital affair. Then the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested and later charged with sexually assaulting a New York City hotel maid. Next came the news that former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with a household staffer and kept it a secret from his wife for 10 years. And in the latest development, ABC news reports that the Justice Department plans to prosecute former presidential candidate John Edwards for using campaign money to - sound familiar? -- cover up an extramarital affair.

(PICTURES: Political Sex Scandals)

Mind you, this has all taken place in a two-week period.

Which brings us back to Jane Austen. Why do politically powerful men so frequently behave so badly?

The roar of the F-16s disturbed the calm on that sunny day in May 2005, but it was the sudden whoosh of helicopters shooting low overhead that brought people out onto the streets of the leafy neighborhood near the National Cathedral just three miles from the White House.

Soon the reason became clear: the almost comical put-putting of a Cessna 150 as it meandered over the quiet residences.

The aging single-engine plane, and its aging and befuddled pilot had managed to shut down all three branches of government and sent Vice President Dick Cheney fleeing from his office.

Four years after Sept. 11, an aircraft no bigger than a car and traveling not much faster sent Washington's top leadership into a panic. Osama bin Laden had done it again.

Locked away in a hidey-hole in Afghanistan or Pakistan, bin Laden didn't have to lift a finger to scare the pants off us. With a single spectacular attack, he achieved the ultimate goal of a terrorist: frightening an entire nation and forcing us to squander a budget surplus on two unwinnable wars.

Now he is dead, but has bin Laden won the bigger fight? Has he turned us into a nation of scaredy-cats?

For weeks after Sept. 11 New Yorkers vied with Washington area residents to claim they had been the most damaged and traumatized by the attacks.

After the attacks induced national hysteria, anyone even trying to say "grow up" was  shouted down and even accused of a lack of patriotism. No one repeated Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural cautionary words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Instead, we knocked one another over in our rush to embrace ever-longer security lines at airports, rent-a-cops demanding to see driver's licenses on the ground floors of medical office buildings and the demolition of parking lots around national monuments, all in the name of security.

"I have always been surprised by the level of fear that I have seen in everyday life," said Gilles Dorronsoro,  a French expert on Afghanistan, Turkey, and South Asia at the  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

For more analysis from Clifford Marks, follow him on Twitter: @cliffmarks.

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1. He supports gay marriage, putting him to the left of the President, who does not.
2. He pushed internally for the public option, and was lobbying Sen. Joseph Lieberman to accept a Medicare buy-in provision that progressives had proposed--losing that fight because the insurance lobby was more persuasive, apparently.
3. Messina had to do what amounted to a secret end-run around Vice President Biden's staff in order to pressure Harry Reid to keep Don't Ask, Don't Tell, from falling victim to a secret compromise on the START treaty.
4. When the White House decided that it would pursue a health care strategy that would allow the Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus to craft a bipartisan proposal, Messina was given the task of keeping his former boss, Baucus, in check. In this Messina did not succeed; the White House underestimated the degree to which partisan Republicans would unite against health care. Maybe this says something about Messina's ability to handle Baucus, but it says nothing about Messina's intent or beliefs about health care.
5. Messina was among those pressing internally for the White House to go after the insurance industry (to make it their health care foil) earlier than they did. (Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod thought that keeping the insurance industry from running advertisements opposing the health care plan would be a masterstroke. They turned out to be wrong; the industry was plotting against the bill all along.

By Marc Ambinder

Rush Limbaugh wants to know: Does the military have contingency plans in the case of a president who is, well, "not too pro-American" in his outlook?

Yes, the broadcaster went there, while discussing the way the Pentagon plans for unexpected crises like Libya with a caller who served in the Pentagon during the 1980s. Limbaugh made sure to emphasize that he was not referring to any specific president... and intimated that he knew he would get in trouble for asking the question. 

"Are you aware of any military contingency plans for a president who might not be your prototypical pro-America president? Are there contingency plans to deal with a president who may not believe that the United States is the solution to the world's problems?" Limbaugh asked.

It used to be that Limbaugh would have found a more subtle way to hilariously (ha! ha!) point to the specter of a coup against a president he disliked, but he's the man behind the golden EIB microphone and I don't even have a face for radio. 

I do have, however, an answer to Limbaugh's question, whether he meant it or not.

The military's contingency plans expressly do not contain any instructions for overthrowing the sitting president. Maybe some Stranglovian planner in the era of 24/7 continuous engagement exercises of the Strategic Air Command drew up something in case a POTUS didn't have the cojones to turn the key, but after the Goldwater-Nichols Act reduced the power of the service chiefs and concentrated command and control authorities in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such planners, disgruntled colonels -- they're always a colonel, right? -- probably don't exist.  

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 spells out a procedure. Let's look at 3 USC 19, subsection "E."  We're dealing with a situation where there is no President, no Vice President, no Speaker of the House and no President Pro Tempore. The law then appoints the Secretary of State as President until either the end of the current president's term in office OR someone higher in the chain of command suddenly re-appears or recovers from injuries and is able to discharge the powers of office.  (The Secretary of Defense is sixth in line, after the Secretary of the Treasury.)

This seems clear: If it's not clear, after some sort of decapitation attack, whether the President, the Vice President or the two Congressional successors are alive, or if they're all alive but disabled, then the Cabinet secretaries become acting President -- until and unless a "prior entitled individual" is able to act.

Let's say that the POTUS, the VPOTUS, the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore are all injured; only the Vice President recovers. As soon as that person is eligible, he or she can "bump" the Acting President aside whenever he wants. Or not. Constitutional scholars don't like this "bumping" provision because it provides incentives for all sorts of mischief and works, really, assuming that national leaders are willing to completely surrender the attachments of their political party and identity. In fact, they don't like the act itself because it builds as much uncertainty into the system as it resolves.

So what does this have to do with Rush's original provocation? The problem is that, in a catastrophic emergency, the people who need to know who is in charge might not have the resources to find this out immediately. These people are, in particular, the Secret Service, and the folks who execute lawful orders from the National Command Authority (which is another name for the commander in chief's executive powers).  

If there's confusion about who's alive and who's dead, if the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are out of the country and can't communicate with the National Military Command Center and don't know who the acting President is, we might be in a pickle.  

Maybe the SecDef will assume, if he doesn't have contact with anyone above him in the chain of command, that HE is acting President. Maybe the Vice President will do the same if he can't reach the President -- or if the Secret Service doesn't know whether the President is alive.   These are extremely unlikely scenarios but ones that have to be accounted for in contingency planning. And they are. It is precisely these questions that are answered by the Continuity of Government programs that the executive branch goes to great lengths to keep under wraps.   

There ARE, in fact, Presidential Emergency Action Directives and other written plans that provide senior officials with what amount to checklists -- have you called here? Have you waited for "x" amount of time? Are you sure that FEMA hasn't done "y"? -- and then empower them to temporarily assume certain presidential empowers in order to make sure that (a) the actual, legal successor can be identified and protected and (b) the government can function. They even spell out what happens if someone lower in the line of succession tries to assume the authority of the president without there being enough certainty. This is scary stuff -- basically, it's the way the government plans to handle attempted coups against itself.  

The military nowhere has the authority to oversee this process of identifying a successor. The SecDef, certainly, as the civilian in charge of the military, directs a number of assets that help in the process and provide physical security, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has no independent authority to identify the successor or make decisions unless directed to by a higher authority. Of course, we can play out uncertainty scenarios to the Nth degree -- what if there is NO civilian authority to be found anywhere? -- but if that's the case, then the country is probably dealing with bigger problems and might welcome (for the moment) the reassuring presence of the name of the JCS.  But this stuff is all outside the realm of the law and extremely high in the realm of the improbable.  

Now -- since 9/11 -- more than $5 billion has been spent to make sure that the above scenarios don't happen.  A lot of the money has gone to communication upgrades to make sure members of the Cabinet can talk to each other even if a Borg cube swoops down and destroys Washington. I've been researching this subject for a while, and I discovered a couple of other things the government has done, some of it quite imaginative. It's the type of stuff that shouldn't find its way into print.  

These scenarios don't account for instances where the Secretary of Defense thinks the President is crazy; James Schlesinger, Nixon's final SecDef, reportedly informed the nuclear command and control officers that they ought to check with him if they received any unusual orders from the President ... and this was during Nixon's late paranoid stage. That was highly, totally, uncompromisingly unconstitutional, but it was arguably quite practical, given the consequences of a nuclear war.  

And there is Alexander Haig's famous declaration of certitude that he was in charge during the confusion after Ronald Reagan was shot. The Secretary of State had forgotten, apparently, that the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore were above him in the line of succession, although Haig would later insist he meant to say that he was in charge of the White House and its immediate executive functions until Vice President Bush returned to Washington.  (Though Reagan's "biscuit" -- his nuclear command code verification card -- was misplaced during the shooting, Bush was connected to the National Military Command Center at all times.  There was no abrogation of the National Command Authority.)

So, questions of taste aside, Mr. Limbaugh, the answer to your question is: No, the military cannot foment a coup against a president they deem as sufficiently un-American and they do not have contingency plans, Top Secret or otherwise to do so. 

By Marc Ambinder

First, to get some qualifications out of the way: I am not cooperating with New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, nor had I been aware of his book project before POLITICO disclosed its existence. Second, like many reporters, I had textual intercourse with Kurt Bardella, the now-former spokesperson for Rep. Darrell Issa.

Our exchanges generally consisted of my attempting to confirm something that someone else reported or Bardella giving me a tip about what his boss was up to the next
day. I do not, as a matter of management, share my private e-mails with anyone,
but I don't recall sending Bardella anything that would interest Leibovich.

When I'm old and gray, and have kids who I can force to listen to my stories, I'll tell them about how I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Frank Buckles.

Buckles, of course, was the last known living World War I veteran. He died late Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W.V. His story has been told countless times by journalists like me who made the two-hour drive from Washington to his picturesque 330-acre farm. And I bet he told every one of those journalists, that his own story wasn't such a big deal.

At 16, Buckles was turned away from a U.S. Marines recruiting station because he was too young to enlist. He later went back to that same recruiting office and told them he was 21, but was rejected a second time because he wasn't heavy enough [In accounts to other reporters, Buckles said he was rejected on his second try for being flatfooted]. Eventually, he found an Army recruiter willing to take him.

He volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver, because he heard it was the quickest way to the front--and he wanted to be where the action was. He spent time in England and later France, but said he didn't come within 40 miles of the fighting. After the war's end in 1918, he was assigned to a prisoner-of-war escort company that was returning POWs to Germany.

Buckles recalled that when he arrived in Germany with the soldiers, a local German organization greeted the men with coffee. As he stood in line to get a cup himself, he told the elderly man serving him -- in a bit of German he'd picked up -- that the coffee was good.

The German, pleased that Buckles spoke his language, gave him a slice of potato bread. Buckles again thanked him in German, and the old man presented him with a slice of bologna.

"After that I was always encouraged to learn foreign languages," Buckles told me in an interview for the Chicago Tribune nearly four years ago. Even at 106, his bookshelves were filled with German, French, Italian and Spanish language books.

After a short stint working at the post office in Oklahoma after returning home from the war, Buckles spent much of the next three decades seeing the world and working in the shipping business.

Ironically, while he managed to come out of World War I as a soldier unscathed, he wasn't so lucky as a civilian during World War II. While he was in Manila on business in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and Buckles was taken prisoner.

He would spend more than three years as a prisoner of war. He lost more than 50 pounds during the time of his capture, and near the end of his internment, a Japanese guard caught an American as he tried to slip back into camp after heading out to forage for food.

"The Japanese guard told him to wait where he had stopped him," Buckles told me. "He came back with his gun and shot him right there." Buckles was among those rescued in a famous parachute mission by the 11th Airborne Division in February 1945.

Buckles took his role as the last veteran of the "War That Was to End all Wars" seriously, but he wasn't a braggart.

Over the years, Buckles probably retold his story to hundreds of journalists and historians. And in December 2009, at a spry 108, Buckles testified before Congress in support of a proposal to turn a Washington, D.C., monument honoring local residents who fought in World War I into a memorial honoring all Americans who served in the war.

When I visited him just before Memorial Day 2007, his daughter, Susannah Flanagan, was worried about wearing him out--and asked me and my colleague Pete Souza (now the White House photographer) to keep our interview to an hour. But Buckles kept telling us stories. Asking our opinion of what was going on in Iraq, and sharing his own concerns about the war.

After about two hours of chatting, Flanagan peaked in and offered a subtle cue for me to wrap it up. I thanked Buckles for sharing his remarkable story and service, but Buckles wouldn't have any of it

The way he saw it, he just happened to serve during a remarkable period of American history and lived longest to tell the world about it.

The latest development in Wisconsin's wild budget debate is a case of mistaken identity. The Buffalo Beast, originally co-founded by bombastic journalistic Matt Taibbi, had one of its staffers call up Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker while posing as libertarian industrialist/political activist David Koch; hi-jinks ensued.

In real life, Koch's money has helped conservative activists support Walker's efforts to pass a controversial budget bill. In this call, which Walker's office confirmed, fake "David Koch" gets Walker to spill his guts on unions, Democrats ... and Mika Brzezinski. A few highlights from the transcript:

Walker: I've got layoff notices ready....
Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. Gotta crush that union.
Walker: [bragging about how he doesn't budge].... I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the Assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders -- talk, not negotiate, and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn. But I'll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state Assembly.... Legally, we believe, once they've gone into session, they don't physically have to be there. If they're actually in session for that day and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they'd have quorum.... So we're double-checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them, that's the only reason why. We'd only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them....
Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That's what I'd do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you'd be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it. ...
Koch: You're the first domino.
Walker: Yep. This is our moment.

If you're gonna cut, spread the pain around. Or so the Brits would advise you.

I have a piece out today in National Journal magazine looking at the early lessons for American lawmakers from the United Kingdom's recently enacted austerity programs. It's a good time to check in on the British experience, given the still-raging debate on the House floor over budget cuts for the current fiscal year. The U.K. just began implementing a dramatic package of steep spending cuts and tax reform - including some hikes - designed to curb the British budget deficit and reduce soaring national debt.

The evidence so far is nowhere near conclusive on how the austerity measures will affect the U.K.'s growth and employment, though the Conservative-led coalition government estimated last year the measures will result in the elimination of about a half-million public sector jobs. But there may be a political lesson coming across the pond for U.S. lawmakers if they hope to find bipartisan agreement with President Obama on plans to tackle long-term questions of taxes, spending (especially entitlements) and reducing U.S. debt levels. That lesson would be, don't just cut the things your opponents like.

In the U.K., notes Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, "they kept absolutely no one safe. Every single individual in the UK is going to feel the impact of these cuts." It's a deliberate strategy: "If you start exempting one (group), the next special interest group is going to pop their head up and say, what about me? What about me?"

Contrast that to House Republicans, who have so far reveled in votes to cut some of liberals' most cherished spending - including major reductions in environmental protection, defunding of Obama's signature health care and financial regulation laws. (Some of those programs - such as Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases, poll well with voters broadly, not just the left.) Perhaps National Journal's Kelsey Snell summed it up best when she tweeted today that the House voted to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, but to keep Pentagon sponsorship of NASCAR races.

Here's the problem: Cutting liberal-loved programs alone won't go nearly far enough to reduce the national debt or even stabilize it. For that, you'll likely need major changes in programs that wide majorities of Americans like, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and likely some unpopular tax increases, too. A lift like that needs coalition support. Which is to say, everybody must hurt.

The Jay Carney era has begun.

With his first turn at the White House podium, the new press secretary didn't make any news, but he still managed to win some points with the press corps. His answers were concise. He didn't spend an inordinate amount of time answering the cable and network reporters questions, and unlike his predecessor, Robert Gibbs, he took questions from reporters from smaller outlets in the back of the briefing room.

Yesterday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan disagreed about whether the Republican budget, to be released in April, will include the kinds of specific plans for entitlement reform that the president's budget lacked. One day later, Ryan and GOP leadership announced they'll put their cards on the table.

"Our budget will lead where the President has failed, and it will include real entitlement reforms so that we can have a conversation with the American people about the challenges we face and the need to chart a new path to prosperity," Ryan said in an e-mailed statement. "Our reforms will focus both on saving these programs for current and future generations of Americans and on getting our debt under control and our economy growing."

Ryan and the House GOP could have used Obama's punt as an excuse to avoid hard choices of their own, but now say they won't. If Ryan can get House Republicans behind a serious entitlement reform plan, it will be a major accomplishment and give his party the rhetorical high ground over the White House and the Democrats. But this could turn into a political trap laid by the administration: There are risks in specificity, hence the president's punt this week, and benefit cuts that will likely be part of any entitlement reform plan will attract immediate and vociferous criticism.

We had some sense that this was coming in the NJ newsroom -- Ryan's staff cancelled a mid-afternoon interview in favor of the announcement -- but specifics are still hard to come by. Ryan's Roadmap for the American Future will no doubt hold some clues, and House Republican leaders had already been talking about Medicare reform along those lines or based on the deal Ryan had negotiated with former Clinton OMB Director Alice Rivlin.

It's a big opportunity for Ryan, whose ideas have been on the cutting edge of conservative economic policy since the Roadmap's original release in 2008. Ryan has long worried that entitlements are unsustainable and that the key to solving the U.S. debt problem lies in their radical overhaul.

Democrats think Ryan goes too far, believing Social Security, which is solvent through 2037, can be fixed with relatively small changes, and that last year's health care overhaul represents a serious first step towards controlling growing health care costs that nearly everyone agrees are the largest driver of long-term debt.

The White House was heavily criticized for not including specifics about long-term debt reduction in its budget, released Monday, and particularly for giving a short shrift to the recommendations of his own fiscal commission. However, administration officials wanted to bring all parties to the table before negotiations begin. While commissioners from both parties voted to support the fiscal commission's plan, including fiscally conservative Republican senators, no members of the House Republican delegation supported the document.

The lack of clarity in the Republican House has made establishing initial positions difficult --- while Ryan's plan is popular with House conservatives, it has not yet been embraced by Republican leadership, and both parties have been reluctant to lay their offers on the table in an uncertain political environment.

You might have heard that the House GOP is now planning to cut $100 billion in spending following pressure from newly-elected conservatives who want them to honor their Pledge to America. That's not precisely true, as we'll explain, but perhaps more importantly, congressional Republicans' insistence on the $100 billion number could prove troublesome down the road.

First, the arithmetic: House Republicans now intend to cut $100 billion -- from last year's White House budget request, which was never enacted. Compared to current real spending, the House GOP plans a cut of about $59 billion, and would still spend $15 billion more on domestic discretionary programs than in 2008.

There's nothing problematic about comparing the GOP's plan with the president's proposed budget to highlight policy differences, but it does matter when you're trying to claim the cuts as savings. Despite the insistence of Republican leaders, their current proposal doesn't match their Pledge to America:

"With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, prebailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to balance the budget and pay down the debt."