44 and the Debt-Ceiling Gambit: Death Struggle or Dance of the Wallflowers ?

Who's right and who's wrong, where do we go from here?  The Financial Times reviews the circumstances of the current Dance of the Wallflowers in Washington, as the President proffers and the GOP, at the final moment, continues to slink away, playing hard and harder to get. No deal intended, just squeeze the administration and watch them squirm.  Leadership, anyone?

"It was too little leadership, too late. To make this strategy succeed, Mr Obama needed the pressure of public opinion to force Republicans to compromise. That pressure is still too weak, and the time to fix this is running out fast. Mr Obama has infuriated much of his party – again. And he has failed to budge a pathologically intransigent Republican party – again. He has come to a moment that could settle the fate of his presidency.

"Does he press on for the big deal, fighting for public support at this absurdly late hour, risking even more? Or does he climb down from his threat to veto a smaller measure, settle on terms dictated by the GOP, and look still further diminished? Neither choice looks promising. Meanwhile, the debt-ceiling clock runs down."

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As one analyst opined, is Barack Obama our greaterest Republican President ever?

Washington Post's Ezra Klein: "Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.


If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s." More here