In June, 2009, he was told that Congress had whittled down by more than two thirds his ten-billion-dollar proposal to fund childhood nutrition, and he was asked if he would like to fund the initiative out of a thirty-five-billion-dollar pot that had appeared fortuitously during the budget process. The White House planned to use the money for community colleges and early education, and Obama was told that, if he didn’t allocate some of the funds, he couldn’t finance his child-nutrition agenda. His advisers suggested that he could make a point about political reform and offered him a plan to ‘ask Congress to fund as much of your original request as possible through reductions in agriculture subsidies.’ They expected the ploy to fail but argued, ‘You would be able to say that you had offered a serious plan to fund the full bill, and Congress had fallen short.’ Next to this more cynical option, Obama wrote, “Yes.
