Reply #9: What do you mean, "no leadership role"?

[inna]

Obama showed very strong leadership on this.

He appointed the commission by Executive Order, against the will of Congress.

He even paid for its budget, for chrissakes.

And he put in charge the same people who've been trying to privatize SS and cut benefits for many years (under Clinton and Bush).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/politics/19fiscal.html?_r=1
Bipartisan Commission Is Established to Cut Debt
Published: February 18, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday officially established a bipartisan commission to propose ways by December to rein in the growing national debt, despite reluctance in both parties to tackling the politically charged issue in a midterm election year.

Mr. Obama signed an executive order establishing the panel three weeks after the Senate rejected bipartisan legislation to create a similar panel.As he did so, he was flanked at the White House by his choices for co-chairmen, Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine B. Bowles, a centrist Democrat from North Carolina who was President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-25/obama-s-deficit-cutting-commission-has-tight-fisted-budget-to-do-its-work.html
Executive Order
Obama created the debt commission in February by executive order after the Senate refused to do so through legislation. Its budget came from money the White House reserves for unanticipated expenses.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010031329/obama-packs-debt-commission-social-security-looters
Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters

After the defeat of the Conrad-Gregg commission, groups defending Social Security had little time to rejoice before Obama resuscitated the plan, creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform by executive order.

Obama's deficit commission is actually much older than Conrad-Gregg. Its history as a vehicle for reforming Social Security goes back to 1981, when it was given life under President Ronald Reagan as the Greenspan Commission (guess who chaired it). The commission's first act was to raise Social Security payroll taxes across the board and lower benefits via changes to cost of living adjustments.

Bill Clinton revived the commission many times during the '90s, each time with a slightly new name and slightly new members, always stacked to recommend partial privatization, which critics on the left mocked as "a solution in search of a problem." But Clinton thought it politically risky to proceed with its recommendations on his own, and in a little-known chapter to that story, his chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, helped negotiate a secret pact with Newt Gingrich in late 1997 to unite behind the commission's proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age and begin privatization .

The pact collapsed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke just days before Clinton was set to announce it. George W. Bush quickly reconstituted the commission in 2001 and adopted its core proposal – Social Security privatization – as the centerpiece to his second-term agenda in 2005. The developing quagmire in Iraq and Bush’s consequent unpopularity gave Democrats, with public outcry behind them, the confidence to unite against it, even though Democratic leaders had supported similar measures in the '90s, and the plan was soon declared dead.

Obama Packs Debt Commission With Social Security Privatization & Benefit Cut Supporters: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/obama-packs-debt-committee-with-supportes-of-social-security-benefit-cuts-and-privatization/