Debtageddon, Debtocalypse, and President Pushover

It was initially disappointing to read Paul Krugman's note that an article in the NYRB about "President Pushover" was not online yet.  I tried anyway; it was online. When I went back to Krugman's blog, he had already updated it.  Man, does this guy eat and sleep and take bathroom breaks at all?

Why is that essay in the NYRB so good?  Because it recaps how we are now only a couple of days away from the default deadline and there is no deal yet on the debt ceiling.  (I heard a funny line on NPR yesterday: most Americans think that raising the debt ceiling will make it harder for them to paint!)  And has sentences like the following:

Boehner hadn’t realized at first that he’d have so many Republican defectors—fifty-four—who voted against the continuing resolution he’d negotiated with Obama in early April, on the ground that it didn’t cut spending enough, though Boehner had, in effect, taken Obama to the cleaners. This established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position.

 And this:

In early July, when Obama suddenly injected Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid into the deficit and debt negotiations, many, perhaps most, Democrats were dismayed. They believed that the President was offering up the poor and the needy as a negotiating gambit. (His position was that if the Republicans would give on taxes, he’d give on entitlements.) A bewildered Pelosi said after that meeting, “He calls this a Grand Bargain?”

So, why did President Pushover, er, Obama wimp out so fast?

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less.

The other side is hostage to the Tea Party and their maniacal single-minded ideological framework that is disconnected from reality:

The antitax dogma of the Republican Party is strongly rooted in mythology. The theory that tax cuts create jobs has been discredited by the results of George Bush’s tax policies. The Republicans cling to the myth that “small business” owners are the “job creators,” and so they oppose proposals to eliminate the Bush rate cuts for even those earning over $250,000. But relatively few small business owners earn $250,000—in fact, fewer than 3 percent of the 20 million people who file business income on their personal tax forms (the 1040s) earn that much.

Why does the Tea Party have so much of a sway over the Republicans anyway?

The Tea Party’s strength was larger than its numbers—about eighty in the House and as few as four in the Senate—because the entire House Republican freshman class and some more senior members were sympathetic to its views, and because the ghost of Bob Bennett now haunts many Republicans. Bennett (still alive), a solid conservative three-term senator from Utah, was, astonishingly, rejected for reelection last year by the Utah Republican caucus for having been insufficiently pure in his conservatism. (His vote in 2006 against a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning was seen as heresy.)
If Bob Bennett could be dumped, no one was safe. Boehner himself was facing a possible primary challenge. Some Tea Party members dug in on the debt ceiling because they, too, feared attacks or challenges, principally from people who would accuse them of not forcing sufficient cuts or of failing to keep their pledge not to raise the debt limit.

So, a wimpy president + lunatics who have taken over the asylum = the crisis where we are now.

Here is to hoping that Churchill was correct when he observed that Americans will do the right thing, once they have exhausted all the alternatives!