You've been hearing a lot of Democratic fire at the President. We Democratic bloggers have been hammering the Presdient and our party leadership over these negotiations, from Progressive's staunch attacks on the "balanced approach" to Obama partisans urging the President to stick to his guns. Well, those days are over. No matter if you support the "balanced approach" or the People's Budget, we've been beaten. We need to take our lumps, reassess where we went wrong, and pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. We have no choice in the matter.
Overall...lets face it, we got our butts kicked and our party leadership, including the President, have stepped on their own feet and tripped over their own shoelaces.
But there is one place where we did win, which should make our re-assessment all the more interesting. The republicans caved on the debt ceiling.
Now some of us have been predicting this all along. Which is why many of us were so livid at the president for even bothering to negotiate over the debt ceiling in the first place. As I've been saying to you all, friends and foes alike, there will not and there never was going to be, a default. It was all a big bluff. But it certainly worked.
Listen to your so-called Tea Party conservatives:
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) another member of the Tea Party Caucus said he would have to review the deal between Obama and GOP leaders but did not seem eager to delay Senate consideration of it beyond Tuesday.
“I don’t want to tempt fate and delay this beyond Aug. 2 but I don’t want to expedite a bad deal,” he said. “We haven’t seen the bill yet.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a conservative Republican freshman and Tea-Party favorite, said: “I’m not going to do anything procedural to slow it down."
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a member of the Senate Tea Party Caucus, said he would insist that any compromise receive at least 60 votes on the Senate floor but not drag out the process to delay an agreement beyond Tuesday.
“I don’t see any reason for not agreeing to an advanced time table,” Lee said. “A 60-vote threshold is one thing but there’s no reason to run the clock out any more.”
Not that they caved to us, mind you. They are caving to their real masters, Wall Street and multinational corporate boardrooms.
Rank and file movement conservatives will be pissed, of course. They don't want any debt ceiling increase AT ALL. To them, even the "dollar for dollar" position of Eric Cantor was a compromise. This is why so many of the true believers, like Bachmann or Erickson, only wanted the Federal Government to just "prioritize" no matter how much havoc it would cause. They'll certainly be against this deal. Not because they think Democrats have won a big victory, but because their position is that their should be no increase in the debt limit for any reason at all.
But the conservative leadership knows that their primary duty is to their fundraisers and benefactors, not to the rabble. They want to, as Laura Ingraham said, "declare victory" and move on to the next phase. The GOP establishment has won all it can, but no matter how much their supporters scream and howl, there was no way they were going to defy their real masters. The rank and file may be crazy and loony, but their leadership knows who butters their bread. It ain't a bunch of old white folks wearing tricorn hats.
The fraying of the GOP caucus as the debt ceiling deadline got closer and closer was all I needed to see. Had the President not agreed to do anything at all, had he gone on vacation, you would have still seen this same result. Wall Street and Corporate America was going to win, no matter what.
This is enough evidence for me to conclude that we could have capitalized on this and laid out a strong position that would have unified our party. I doubt even Obama's most strident supporters would have opposed him had he simply refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling and made the budget issues a separate matter. This was the key tactical error the White House made, besides the more fundamentally erroneous strategic error of extending the Bush Tax Cuts. They bought the bluff. They revealed their fear of default. The GOP capitalized. The White House blinked and then folded.
We have got to press our leaders and our party rank-and-file to stop blinking. That is first thing we need to get our leadership and our ordinary voters to understand. Stop being afraid of GOP threats and don't be afraid to spill some blood in a tough battle.
However, we can at least learn from this that the GOP's real fealty isn't to the Tea Party's useful idiot supporters. That is something we should be able to exploit in the next hostage crisis.