Elmer Smith: Deficit-reduction will be a booby-hatched plan

YOU REALLY can't appreciate those deficit-reduction talks on Capitol Hill until you've seen the mating dance of the blue-footed booby.

The potential partners approach cautiously and alternately lift and lower their bright-blue, webbed feet, the way sumo wrestlers stomp before clinching.

In a moment of candor, a booby might concede that all that foot-stomping and those dazzling displays of plumage add little to the coupling that follows. But those who have seen it say that the courtship ritual is far more memorable than the consummation.

That's what our leaders in Washington are hoping. They are on the brink of a deal that neither side will be happy with. So, Democrats and Republicans want their constituents to know that they stomped their feet and flapped their wings for as long as they could.

They want us to remember the fight they put up, rather than the deal they made. That way, each side can blame the other for the egg it lays. Nobody is going to want to claim this cross-bred hatchling.

Republican congressional leaders who have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they will never go for a tax hike are likely to sign off on a plan that includes closing tax loopholes, reducing tax breaks for favored corporations and, possibly, even allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire in 18 months.

President Obama, in a move that puts him at odds with 72 percent of the Democratic respondents in a recent Pew Foundation poll, has signaled his willingness to consider cuts in Medicare and Social Security spending in return for letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire and eliminating some oil-industry subsidies.

This puts the president perilously close to the third rail of national politics. Most Democrats would sooner take a sharp stick in the eye than to threaten the sacred cow worshipped by one of their most loyal constituencies, senior citizens. These folks go to the polls to vote for those who vote for them and against those they perceive as voting against them.

It's a course that is fraught with danger for both sides. About 60 percent of the respondents to the Pew poll feel that maintaining the status quo in Social Security and Medicare spending is more important than reducing the deficit. Only 32 percent favored deficit reduction over retaining those entitlements.