Walter Shapiro is troubled by Obama’s near-silence on the debt-ceiling:
Of course, the president is not going to convince the Glenn Beck brigades and Rush Limbaugh legions to support extending the government’s borrowing authority. But the bully pulpit does count for something with the independents who misguidedly believe that raising the debt ceiling is somehow more dangerous than the government refusing to pay its obligations. Two months is long enough for Obama to explain to the voters in the middle what the stakes are in what could prove to be the biggest political showdown between now and the 2012 election.
Give him a month or so. The man never pounces too soon, and too much is still up in the air. And in fairness to the GOP, until Obama actually presents an alternative to the Ryan plan for Medicare that is even faintly plausible as a real cost-cutter, or offers defense cuts to balance the fiscal equation, or proposes more serious tax hikes than his current position (the Clinton levels), he is empowering the GOP's fiscal vandalism. Chait hopes Obama will demagogue the issue after the fact, if it comes to that. Andrew Pavelyev, meanwhile, is unimpressed by the Republican debt "strategy":
House Republicans failed to prioritize the long-term over the short-term and wasted a lot of legislative time funding the government in two- and three-week increments. They only achieved very modest budget cuts and didn’t address any long-term structural problems. Unfortunately, that was actually the most productive use of time in the House. The rest was totally, completely wasted on symbolic actions designed to please some (not even all) segments of the Republican base while driving away independents and setting a confrontational tone in Washington (thus making it harder to accomplish anything, given that the Democrats still control the Senate and the White House).
Maybe Obama's strategy is to allow the GOP to become so identified with not raising the debt ceiling that if we default, the GOP will be far more clearly on the hook for the consequences than even Gingrich was more than a decade ago. To my mind, that's too scary to contemplate. The consequences of an actual default are infinitely more damaging than a mere government shut-down – and simply not worth the partisan benefits of a GOP-led global depression. Which means I hope Obama and the Dems resist their partisan edge right now and endorse a Bowles-Simpson-style grand bargain before the worst happens.
What I worry about is that the GOP is, in fact, increasingly the reverse of a conservative party. They don't much care if extraordinary damage – even a global depression – occurs in their mission to take us back to before the Great Society. And a default and recession is something they hope to pin on Obama.
I don't think that would work. But I'm not sure they realize that. Gulp.
(Photo: Two cocks fight for a ball during a chicken football match show in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning province on July 8, 2010. AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
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