The very end of the WaPo article reports that Conrad's budget assumes that the Bush tax cuts will not be extended in 2010 and that troops will begin to withdraw starting in the fall of 2008 -- two pretty good assumptions I'd say, at least looking ahead from March 22, 2008.

Conrad also neglects to deal with the AMT long-term until after the '08 elections. Tricks exactly? I dunno...

Let's assume for a moment that the troops are indeed withdrawn in the fall of 2008 (an assumption that is far from certain). There will nevertheless still be infrastructure costs, contractual obligations, and some - at the very least - troops remaining in the area. In other words, we can be almost certain that there will be significant costs associated with Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and beyond. Yet no budgets reflect that near certainty.

Perhaps that's common practice in Washington - I'm not sure. But if you criticize the Whtie House (and Gov. Daniels) for doing it, you better have an answer as to why it's not also wrong for the Democratic House to do the same.

I would like to see all the budget gimcrackery tossed out the window, too, and I'm not excited to see the Dems using it; although there are very legitimate fears on the left side of the aisle about being the 'eat your vegetables' party, required to come in and clean up GOP messes just long enough for the GOP to come back and make the same messes all over again. I'm going to mostly reserve judgment until we have house, senate, and presidency in two years-- and, importantly, holding the senate by a somewhat higher margin.

It also sounds like they are _not_ using the kind of longer-term pseudo-balancing tricks (like head-fake sunset clauses), which is a good thing in & of itself.

But in terms of the main sentiment of the post, isn't this all a bit apples-to-oranges? Mitch Daniels is being chastised, in the quoted material, not for playing accounting games with the Iraq war, but for making exceedingly false predictions about the costs themselves. Those predictions weren't in the context of budgetery flim-flam accounting -- they were just straight up 'this is what it'll cost us' claims. And they are claims that have since been massively falsified.

Now, I'm actually inclined to give the governor a break on this, because he's been _much_ more responsible about budget matters as governor than his political masters would ever allow him to be when he was in the WH. It's clear that this administration practices super-hard-core message discipline, and I'm not sure we'll ever know what Daniels really thought at the outset of the war (as opposed to what he was instructed to say).

But: should he ever want to cite his years in the WH as evidence for any sort of 'trust my expertise' claim, then Jen's arguments would be relevant & on target.