There it was deep in President Barack Obama's critique of the Republican proposal for next year's budget. He said: "There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires."

The rhetoric of Sen. Bernard Sanders had found its way into a major address by the president of the United States. Millionaires and billionaires - it rolls off Sanders' lips with the ease of a true blue populist. And now Obama was taking on the millionaires and billionaires, too.

Solving the nation's financial problems will be enormously complex, but as the 2012 election season approaches, the battle lines are being drawn and issues are being reduced to stark choices. Obama's waiting game on the budget has allowed him to frame the issue in a way that should prove favorable to him in the election. It's the people against the millionaires and billionaires. And it's not just Obama saying so. The budget plan unveiled by Republicans in the House makes his case for him.

Obama is not naturally a partisan battler. He has always fashioned himself as a reconciler, someone who could hear both sides and bring people together. Some of his greatest moments have come on those occasions when he has been called upon to address the nation's most searing divisions: his speech on race in 2008 in Philadelphia; his speech in Tucson in January following the shootings that injured Rep. Gabby Giffords. 

His role as a compromiser has threatened to lose him support among fellow Democrats who have despaired of what he has felt compelled to give away when he strikes a deal. The compromise on taxes last December, when he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, were especially dispiriting.

But there is no compromise when it comes to elections. Obama has announced his re-election plans early, and the Republicans' budget proposals have helped him define the issues. 

How does he define them. Here is what he said in his deficit speech: "They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right, and it's not going to happen as long as I'm president."

Of all the nation's problems, the impoverishment of the nation's millionaires and billionaires is one of the least serious. It is likely that the American people will be with him on this.

Ordinarily, the American voter has little stomach for populist resentment of millionaires and billionaires. That's why for many years Sanders' socialist-inspired rhetoric was viewed as far out and extreme by many people. Vermonters may have been willing to elect him, but the general view was that Sanders was out there somewhere on the left.

But favoritism for millionaires and billionaires is hard to stomach at a time of high unemployment and Wall Street fraud that has gone largely unpunished. Now the hedge fund managers and corrupt bankers who ruined the nation and threw millions out of work want us to cut their taxes even as we force Grandma to pay thousands of dollars more for her Medicare. That shouldn't be a hard speech for Obama to write.

If Sanders used to be radical for making assertions like those, the Republicans have drawn him into the mainstream. The eight and a half hour speech he delivered in the Senate last December excoriating the tax deal Obama made with the Republicans has now been published as a book, and Sanders' folk hero status extends across the nation.

On the differing budget proposals offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican from Wisconsin, and Obama, Sanders is squarely in Obama's camp. "While the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations are doing extremely well," Sanders said, "the Republicans want more giant tax breaks for the very rich as they move to balance the budget on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the children and by cutting environmental protection and infrastructure. This is morally unacceptable and very bad economics."

Obama couldn't have said it better.