The Debt Ceiling Debacle
- Details
- Category: Bryan Vinson
- Published on Tuesday, 16 August 2011 14:33
- Written by BryanVinson
At what point are you looking at a leader who simply can’t lead, or a resistant congress not interested in the good of the country in spite of a President trying his hardest?
Looking at the fallout of the debt ceiling debacle, President Obama seems to be mostly winning the spin war, but not by a great margin. Both the President and the Republican House of Representatives took a beating in popularity, but the idea that the Republican’s wouldn’t budge even with a “balanced approach” on the table is the prevailing attitude. President Obama has used what ever momentum can be gained by that perception to launch into his reelection campaign angle that “Congress is Broken.” No longer content with blaming the Bush administration for his inability to lift the country remotely out of the recession like conditions we have found ourselves in for the past two year, Obama has started to target the Republicans and Congress in general for the blame game. He is, once again, needed to fix Washington DC, which he didn’t get around to in the first term. He has become vocally pessimistic about congress’s ability to produce ideas about job creation, an area where he had previously been the expert. Essentially, Congress needs the guiding hand of President Obama.
Let’s take a look at the debt ceiling debate. Obama got involved late, as usual, and then proceeded to take a commanding presence in the negotiations. He put his foot down on offering a debt ceiling bill that did not include raises of taxes for the top two wealthiest percent. This is a personal campaign promise he’s been unable to pass. Strange that it popped up in these negotiations. In exchange he offered deep cuts over ten years of three trillion dollars. Unfortunately, Republicans have been long against those tax raises and averted them at the end of 2010. Also a problem, both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush heard that song and dance of tax raises for spending cuts before from the democrat party, and got burned by it. As the dealings went back and forth between the House Speaker John Boehner and the President, it seemed as a consensus couldn’t be reached. Obama came out everyday, despite being overexposed as it is, and used press conferences and interviews to scare the population with threats that the social security checks might not go out if the debt ceiling wasn’t resolved. He predicated dire economic consequences if a deal wasn’t reached and the USA received a credit downgrade. Yet Obama had drawn a line in the sand of his own that stopped any deal from being reached. Later he would spin the fear tactics as a strictly Republican technique.
It’s telling that when it got down to the wire, the House and the Senate got together without the President and put together a deal they could all live with. Without Obama’s guiding hand, our congress didn’t act broken at all. They got it done. Democrats didn’t get the revenue increases they sought. Republicans didn’t get the really deep cuts they wanted. The Tea Party Republicans got the future chance to vote on a balanced budget amendment which will likely never pass, so they got nothing. The debt ceiling was raised and there was no default. The United States credit was still downgraded. Was it because the deal wasn’t big enough? Was it because all the parties, including the President, let it drag on to the 11th hour? Was it because the United States debt is ridiculous to begin with?
