Some have asked how I view the debt ceiling deal.
I made clear early on that the Republicans could not stand up against the public pressure that would result from a refusal by the House to increase the debt ceiling. I said it again, and again.
A fixed debt limit and the subsequent immediate balanced budget would have meant an immediate spending cut of forty percent, since today we are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend. While freeing the resources tied down by that spending would eventually be a good thing, the abruptness of the change would have been economic brutality.
So that game was over from the start. The deal we got includes tiny spending cuts in 2012, with all substantial cuts promised for 2013 and beyond. While it's easy to overestimate the importance of numbers on paper, the 3% growth in the Congressional Budget Office baseline that we conservatives love to hate is nothing more than that. Chipping a tooth or two off that baseline will have real effects going forward.
I've said from the start that the debt limit game was all about the 2012 elections, and that all the House Republicans could hope to do was force the red state Democrat Senators to vote against reasonable bills, or to force The Awesome O to veto something the Senate passed.
We didn't get much of that, though those red-state Senators are on record in cloture votes to table Republican House passed bills. We did get the Republicans in the House to stand together for the principles of smaller government and lower spending. That played very well with the fiscally conservative and socially liberal independents once known as Reagan Democrats and that later supported Ross Perot. That segment of the electorate was critical to Reagan's victories and to the 2010 Congressional landslide. The House Republican strategy not only avoided driving them away but also drove a wedge further between them and Barack Obama. The president's poll numbers fell precipitately in the closing weeks of the battle.
We also got TAO to show himself as a hapless loser [two links]. The man got rolled by John Boehner! Honestly. John Boehner and the Tea Party? They sound like the worst rock group ever. John Boehner and the Tea Party Crazies? No-hit wonders. But TAO's approval ratings with independents are swirling down the swing state toilets as we speak. TAO got rolled. He could have had a $4T deal with new "revenues" of $0.8T, but he held out for $0.4T more and Boehner left the table. In the end, TAO got no new revenues, nothing at all. Zero. Zip. Nada!
And then we got the progressivists to go flat-out screechingly crazy, and it all became worth it.
