Barack Obama and Joe Biden listen during the governors meeting. Obama talks helos with McCain

President Barack Obama opened Monday’s economic summit by taking aim at the “casual dishonesty” of Bush administration budgets Monday, saying he’ll abandon accounting “tricks” used to hide the ballooning deficit and pledging to cut a $1.3 trillion federal shortfall in half during his first term.

By the summit’s close, Obama was trying for a more bipartisan approach, presiding over an extraordinary session where he took questions and comments directly from lawmakers. He started the proceedings by calling on his presidential rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who questioned why the new presidential helicopters cost as much as Air Force One.


“I don’t think there is any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers enormous amounts of money,” McCain told Obama.

Obama quickly agreed, saying he’d ordered a review of the program, whose cost has soared form $6.1 billion to $11.2 billion. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” the president said to laughter. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before. Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.”

But behind the levity was serious business for Obama, who goes before the American people at a joint address to Congress Tuesday trying to explain how he’ll dig the nation out of its economic mess. He began that effort today by pledging to change the way budgeting is done in Washington.

“I want to be very clear,” Obama said in opening the session in the White House State Dining Room. “We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration and the next generation.”

In his opening remarks, Obama returned several times to criticism of past budget practices that clearly was aimed at President George W. Bush’s administration, suggesting the former president and his team weren’t candid with the American people about the scope of the budget difficulties.

At one point, Obama criticized “the casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks, the costly overruns, the fraud and abuse, the endless excuses. This is exactly what the American people rejected when they went to the polls. They sent us here to usher in a new era of responsibility in Washington, to start living within our means again and being straight with them about where their tax dollars are going.”

Obama also made clear that he believe he was inheriting the current budget mess from Bush — even though roughly a quarter of the $1.3 trillion deficit stems directly from Obama’s recently economic stimulus package.

Still, Obama said he would break from several of Bush’s practices in building his own 10-year budget being released Thursday. Obama said he would put the full cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the budget, and allocate money for natural disasters – two things Bush did not do.

“We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend. In order to address our fiscal crisis, we have to be candid about its scope,” Obama said. Failure to act quickly and decisively, Obama said, “we risk sinking into another crisis down the road.”

Despite his whacks at Bush, Obama’s closing session descended into some rare bipartisan accolades.

The exchange between the two former competitors won praise from Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) “I think it’s very symbolic and very interesting that the first person you called on is John McCain,” Baucus said. “I think that’s the tone we have to take here.”

Yet Obama also singled out House Republican Whip Eric Cantor – one of his fiercest critics on Capitol Hill -- joking that “some day, sooner or later, he's going to say Obama had a good idea."

Obama added, “On the one hand, the majority has to be inclusive. On the other hand, the minority has to be constructive…the minority has got to then come up with those ideas and not just want to blow the thing up.”

While some of Obama’s critics seemed caught up in the bonhomie, some who didn’t score an invite to the summit sang a different tune.

“It is ironic that the president is holding a summit on fiscal responsibility less than a week after instigating and signing a massive, wasteful stimulus bill,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told Politico. “Convening groups to talk about deficits and holding a photo-op isn't going to pay off our debts -- we should be focusing on reducing our estimated $1.2 trillion deficit by reforming entitlement programs and reducing wasteful government spending…That would be something all Americans could support, not just the limited group admitted to attend his summit today.”

The summit was designed to bring together congressional leaders from both parties along with outside interest groups and experts. One key goal of the summit to find ways to rein in spending on Medicaid and Medicare – which Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag said Monday was key to putting the nation’s economy back on track.

But White House aides have tried to keep expectations low for the one-day event, saying they don’t expect any policy prescriptions to be decided in the meetings and five breakout session on health care, taxes and the like. Attending the meetings this morning were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader John Boehner, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat Dick Durbin and other top lawmakers.

Manu Raju contributed.