Stage Set for 'Biggest Fight' Over America's Future

WASHINGTON, March 1, 2009— -- The battle over President Obama's historic -- and historically expensive -- budget begins this week.

The blueprint for the nation's spending marks the most dramatic ideological shift since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It would overhaul health care, boost spending on education and global warming, and shift more of the cost to wealthy taxpayers and corporations.

Speaking on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, the president's economic point man, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszak, defended the $3.5 trillion plan.

"We face big problems, and we've got to tackle them," Orszak said. "Clearly, this budget is changing course."

On Tuesday and Wednesday, he will testify before the House and Senate budget committees on Capitol Hill, where critics like Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich say he faces a battle of historic proportions.

"This budget sets the stage for the biggest fight over the future of America since 1965," Gingrich told CBS News.

If so, history is on the Democrats' side, political analyst Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told ABC News.

"In 1965, Lyndon Johnson, with swollen majorities in Congress, got the Great Society through, so if Newt is saying that the parallel is 1965, that's bad news for Republicans because he picked a time when Democrats managed to stomp all over them and change the face of America," Ornstein said.

Just weeks into his honeymoon as a new president, the president also has the advantage of public support. Obama is trusted by more Americans on the economy than his Republican critics are, 61 percent to 26 percent, according to a Feb. 23 ABC News-Washington Post poll with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Because budget bills cannot be blocked by filibuster, Democrats need only a simple majority, rather than a filibuster-proof 60 votes to approve it. So unless the president loses the support of a significant number of conservative Democrats, when all the debate is over, the Democrat-controlled Congress is likely to approve a version to his liking.

But it is likely to be approved along party lines. The ambitious plan has hardened the ideological lines between Democrats promising big government solutions and Republicans who believe as Ronald Reagan did, that, "Government isn't the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

That is unlikely to change unless the economic spiral accelerates, Ornstein told ABC.

"The one thing that could bring the parties together is if this crisis deepened to a point where everybody in the country thought that we 're playing with real bullets here and the economy could go into serious depression," Ornstein said.

Republicans are outraged over the staggering cost.

"He's now going to add more debt in the first 20 days than was incurred in two wars, 9/11 and a recession handed to us by the previous administration," Karl Rove, a former political advisor to President George W. Bush, said on ABC's "This Week."

Democrats and their allies are outraged by the Republican outrage.

"Mr. Rove, it is laughable -- laughable -- to hear talk about fiscal responsibility from someone who helped plunge this nation into a trillion dollars of debt through tax cuts for the very rich and a war we should never have fought," Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, said in response to Rove.