By Jim Kuhnhenn
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — For Barack Obama, winning a giant economic revival bill in Congress should be the easy part.

Taming the nation's rising deficits and debt and bringing entitlement programs to heel? Good luck.

For now Obama is using his considerable political muscle and public goodwill to leverage a massive stimulus bill — big spending, big tax cuts — to inject adrenaline into an economy in crisis.

But he best save a significant part of that political capital if he wants to overhaul so-far politically inviolable programs such as Social Security and Medicare and avert a looming crisis that few Americans now feel or comprehend.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up 42 percent of the federal budget, providing a vital baseline of income and health security to millions of Americans. They are the symbols of government's social compact with its citizens. But a retiring baby boom generation and steady increases in health care costs are placing the programs on a potentially unsustainable course.

If Obama wants to curtail government spending by tampering with entitlements, he will be venturing into one of Washington's most vexing political problems. Depending on what he attempts to do and when he does it, it would test his political skills and potentially risk the political well-being of lawmakers from his own party.

President Bush, fresh off his 2004 re-election, tried to contain Social Security's rising costs by proposing personal savings accounts. The idea backfired when even members of his own party declined to fall behind it.

Indeed, the choices for reining entitlement costs are limited and politically unpalatable — any solution would ultimately require higher taxes, reduced benefits or both.

Obama has sought to reassure the public and Congress that he is wary of the government's long-term fiscal outlook — one driven home with stark reality this week when the Congressional Budget Office projected a whopping, record-stomping $1.2 trillion deficit for the 2009 budget year.

In pitching his stimulus plan, Obama has vowed to be a good fiscal steward who will confront the nation's deficit when the economy rebounds. On Wednesday, he vaguely indicated that Social Security and Medicare would be a "central part" of his deficit reduction plans. But that was in response to a reporter's question. His speech Thursday, where he acknowledged that the stimulus package would increase the deficit, did not mention entitlement programs.

Unlike the stimulus, which is addressing a crisis that is apparent daily to most Americans, the need to overhaul entitlement programs is designed precisely to avoid a crisis. Politicians have been unable to create the sense of urgency over Social Security or Medicare that now exists in the midst of foreclosures, frozen credit, massive layoffs and depleted savings.

"President Obama is walking into a fiscal disaster of stunning proportion, coupled with an economic downturn of unknown duration and depth, but one that I think we can already forecast will be longer than any other downturn since the Great Depression and not exceeded in severity since the Great Depression," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., warned Thursday. "The combination of the retiring baby boom generation, rising health care costs and inadequate revenues will explode deficits to clearly unsustainable levels."

One Obama economic official said the president-elect will confront rising entitlement costs first by attempting to control health care spending — the premier factor driving increases in Medicare and Medicaid. Health care was a significant campaign issue, especially during the Democratic Party primaries. Obama has proposed a $50 billion to $65 billion health care plan that would be paid by rolling back tax cuts for taxpayers who make more than $250,000 a year. He has put former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle in charge, giving him dual responsibility as secretary of health and human services and director of a new White House office on health reform.

But if that's a side path to correcting the rising costs of entitlements, it is no less politically challenging. As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1993-94 famously met with a revolt from insurers and business groups against the Clinton health plan. The Congress, controlled then as now by Democrats, turned the Clintons down.

For now, Obama's main attempt to present himself as the harbinger of fiscal restraint is to demand that his stimulus package be subject to strict oversight, to reject congressional pet projects and assign a performance officer to ride herd on federal agencies.

"It's a good thing to talk about no earmarks and that we're going to make sure that this money is spent wisely," said Robert Bixby of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. "But it encourages this short term thinking."

"The Baby Boomers are about to retire, we've got Social Security and Medicare. Those are really, really big challenges out there and we just can't afford to lose track of that, even as we do a lot of deficit spending in the short term."

Jim Kuhnhenn covers politics and economics for The Associated Press.