Chris Weigant nails down the grandstanding on debt ceilings:
Stalling helps both sides in this fight, in two major ways. The first is purely political, and the second is more practical. With the clock busily ticking away, everyone involved in this struggle is scoring political points with the public (or, at the very least, trying their hardest to do so). When a deal emerges at the last minute, all the politicians in Congress will be able to go to their party’s base and state: “We fought as hard as we could, and we got the best deal we possibly could have gotten.” The very fact that the negotiations went down to the wire will bolster this assertion — again, for both sides. Remember, right after this deal is struck, Congress will be going on vacation for a month, and both parties want to be able to face the voters with the claim that they didn’t prematurely give in on their core party principles. If a deal is struck too early, then it will appear one side or the other caved too fast. Which means that both parties have a vested interest in pushing things to the very last instant.
That press conference yesterday in which the president spoke civilly of John Boehner and told Republicans to eat their peas? Within hours, Adam Green of Bold Progressives sent me a histrionic email, very upset by this line from the president:
We’re going to have a sales job. This is not pleasant. It is hard to persuade people to do hard stuff that entails trimming benefits and increasing revenues. (Emphasis mine)
Green only hears “trimming benefits.” Republicans only hear “increasing revenues.” With the Overton Window thus centered, the president stands in the middle — as always. Any change to entitlements is surrender. Any change in the tax code is surrender. Yet these extreme positions will probably find a synthesis in the nick of time because Obama remains in the center. It’s called the burden of governing.
