'You guys are pretty impatient'

President Obama defends his budget plan at his first press conference of the year. | AP Photo By: Josh Gerstein February 15, 2011 12:21 PM EST

President Barack Obama used his first press conference of the year Tuesday to defend his new budget plan against critics who say it doesn’t move quickly enough to cut the federal government’s massive deficit and fails to confront the difficult choices needed to reform ballooning entitlement programs. “You guys are pretty impatient. If something doesn’t happen today, then the assumption is it isn’t going to happen,” Obama said. “My goal here is to actually solve the problem….It’s not to get a good headline on the first day.” Obama said his budget plan would help get the country on the right fiscal path by bringing spending for everything other than interest costs into line with revenues by 2017. “That’s important and that’s hard to do,” the president said. “We’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.” The president said the budget he proposed, which includes a freeze on domestic discretionary spending, will mean painful cuts for programs he values. “We’ve taken a scalpel to the discretionary budget rather than a machete,” he said. “It’ll mean cutting things I care about deeply, like community action programs for low-income communities. And we have some conservation programs that are going to be scaled back. These are all programs that I wouldn’t be cutting if we were in a better fiscal situation, but we’re not.” Obama denied that by failing to propose major entitlement reforms he was abandoning the plan presented in December by most members of a bipartisan commission he set up to tackle the nation’s grim fiscal picture. “The notion that it’s been shelved I think is incorrect,” Obama said. “It still provides a framework for a conversation.” “I agree with much of the framework. I disagree with some of the framework,” the president said. “There are some issues in there that as a matter of principle I don’t agree with where I think they didn’t go far enough or they went too far. He did not detail his disagreements and noted that some Republican panel members, including new House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, opposed the final report. Obama said he thought significant progress could be made on the deficit and entitlement issues in the next couple of years—a prospect many analysts consider to be unlikely as the 2012 presidential election approaches. However, he signaled that he was reluctant to put forward a detailed entitlement reform plan that could be pilloried by critics at both ends of the political spectrum. “If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.” Obama repeatedly boasted about the tax deal he reached with Republicans last December—a deal which liberals are again decrying for extending tax cuts for the wealthy even as programs for lower-income individuals are now facing cuts to programs they benefit from. Obama also said he was willing to talk to Republicans about further cuts, though he said he was likely to resist some of their proposals. But he professed optimism about reaching an agreement through what he called “an adult conversation where everyone says, here’s what’s important and here’s how we pay for it.”. “If we’re cutting infant formula to poor kids, is that who we are as a people?…..That’s something we’re going to have to debate,” he said. On the tumultuous international front, Obama said he was pleased with the direction of developments in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak resigned last week. “What we’ve seen so far is positive…..So far, at least, we’re seeing the right signals coming out of Egypt,” he said. Obama also rejected suggestions that his administration was too slow to embrace the protesters in Egypt and to publicly break with the Mubarak “I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history,” Obama said. “We were very mindful that it was important for this to remain an Egyptian event—that the United States did not become the issue….I think we calibrated it just about right.” The president also joined a long line of U.S. officials giving encouragement to demonstrators in Iran who are trying to pressure their government in much the same way Egyptians forced Mubarak out. “I find it ironic. You’ve got the Iranian regime pretending to celebrate what happened in Egypt when in fact they have acted in direct contrast to what happened in Egypt by gunning down and beating people who are trying to express themselves peacefully in Iran,” Obama said. Obama also said technology has given demonstrators the upper hand over rulers in a variety of authoritarian countries—countries he said need to heed the trend towards change. “You can’t maintain power through coercion. At some level in any society, there has to be consent,” Obama said. “That’s particularly true in this new era where people communicate not just through some centralized government or state-run TV but they can get on their smart phones or Twitter account and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people.” “We do want to make sure that transitions do not degenerate into chaos and violence,” Obama added. On a lighter note, Obama denied that he’s making calls to his hometown of Chicago to boost the mayoral campaign of his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. “I don’t have to make calls for Rahm Emanuel. He’s been doing just fine on his own,” Obama said. “He’s been very busy shoveling snow out there. I’ve been very impressed with that. I never saw him shoveling snow around here,” the president quipped.