Rooting For Mitch
by digby
Dday has a good piece up in The American Prospect this morning about the McConnell plan, explaining the ramifications for both sides. He explains the ridiculous mechanics of the proposal and then offers this analysis:
He doesn’t want him or any of his GOP colleagues to have to vote to increase the debt limit. His primary concern is that Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin—moderate Democrats who could fall to Republicans next year—have to take that vote, and that Obama has the full responsibility for engineering it. In other words, he wants what every Senate Minority Leader has wanted since time immemorial: to put all the responsibility for approving a controversial and unpopular measure on the majority party. Under this plan, Republicans could vote against the increase without worrying about causing a default and accuse Democrats of racking up debt. And since the President would have to submit a specific request for the increase, it fits with McConnell’s other goal of driving down Obama’s popularity and making him a one-term President. What’s more, the spending cut term paper that Obama would have to write may prove useful in the upcoming 2012 budget talks.
He goes on to explain that this is fatally flawed because there's no reason to believe that any endangered Democratic Senator will have to vote to raise the debt ceiling -- nor is it obvious to me that this is the horrifying prospect that McConnell thinks it is. (It is true, however, that if this deal goes through the Villagers will probably begin to portray these votes as the political kiss of death. They're very suggestible.)
This seems to me to be the weirdest aspect of McConnell's proposal. If, as Dday says, he's doing it because his overarching desire is to put Democrats in a bind having to take this "tough vote" over and over again, then this doesn't really do it. Without it being attached to Presidential pressure on spending cuts or tax hikes, I don't see any reason why these are particularly difficult votes.(It's true that it ends Obama's apparent delusion that he could take the deficit "off the table" but that was never going to happen anyway so no harm no foul. He helped put it there and now he's stuck with it.) It seems to me that this is very weak face saving, but if McConnell can sell it, more power to him. Essentially this is a clean vote and that's the most important thing.
But the story doesn't end there, unfortunately. Dday continues:
But if Republicans believe themselves to be without leverage, the Democratic President in the White House is in the opposite role. He’s now the one using the debt limit to force a deal, one bigger than even his own party favors, with major cuts to cherished programs like Medicare and Social Security. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in response to McConnell’s plan that President Obama still wanted to “seize this unique opportunity to come to agreement on significant, balanced deficit reduction.”
Given the righteous conservative anger at McConnell and Obama’s preoccupation with a bipartisan deal, this doesn’t mean we can close the book on this debt limit increase just yet. But even if McConnell's plan passes, the legacy of what Obama put on the table for cuts in these talks will haunt Democrats for many years, and we'll see those proposals again—with lines like "Even Barack Obama supported" attached to them. It was a damaging strategy.
Indeed it was. And any "pivot" to jobs has been severely hamstrung by the President's endless rhetoric about "belt tightening" and spending cuts. But at least they won't be cutting spending with over 9% unemployment at the same time, so if they do manage to get some infrastructure on the table they won't have already robbed Peter to pay Paul and destroyed any stimulative effects.
And then there's Dday's final line, which is sweet, even if it only holds for a moment:
But for the first time in a while, you heard the words “Republicans” and “spineless capitulation” in the same sentence.
Why do I keep getting the image of a jealous and tipsy old Mitch reeling onto the stage during the final act of the kabuki dance, ruining Boehner and Obama's carefully choreographed ending?
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