Liberal Anxiety About Debt Ceiling

     There's a lot of skepticism that the President will hold good on his pledge not to negotiate on the debt ceiling. There's a feeling that he will cave based on the idea that he's caved so many times before.

     "The fight over the fiscal cliff was just one battle in that war. It ended, arguably, in a tactical victory for Democrats. The question is whether it was a Pyrrhic victory that set the stage for a larger defeat."

      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/opinion/kurgman-battles-of-the-budget.html?_r=0

      At least he acknowledges that it was a victory-many libs are still in denial about this. However, he sees the President as a real risk to mess up by giving away concessions regarding the debt ceiling despite that he's vowed not to:

      So why are many progressives — myself included — feeling very apprehensive? Because we’re worried about the confrontations to come.

According to the normal rules of politics, Republicans should have very little bargaining power at this point. With Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, the G.O.P. can’t pass legislation; and since the biggest progressive policy priority of recent years, health reform, is already law, Republicans wouldn’t seem to have many bargaining chips.

But the G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.

Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.

But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.

So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.

 

     It will turn into defeat if the President makes any concessions in exchange, agreed. However, why is it believed so strongly that it will? I actually disagree with two elements of Krugman's narrative quite strongly. I don't agree that the President caved by taking a deal rather than going over the cliff.

 

    I don't even see him as conceding too much in the debt ceiling debate in 2011-he had less political capital then and had to seem to be taking the question of cutting the deficit seriously as the Republicans had some political capital then. They overreached outrageously, and now have none.

 

     Greg Sargent takes it a step further and argues that Obama can't not negotiate on the debt ceiling. The idea is that the media-as Krugman suggested-has bought into debt ceiling chicken as a legitimate political debate and tactic. If this is widely accepted by the pubic the President will have to negotiate.

 

     'Press coverage of the debt ceiling fight is only exacerbating this problem. As noted here yesterday, news orgs are treating this looming battle as a standard Washington standoff, in which each side is withholding concessions in order to extract what it wants from the other. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Alec MacGillis has a good piece today documenting that there has been a palpable shift in the tone of media discussion from the last debt ceiling crisis. While last time, the GOP’s debt ceiling hostage taking was properly covered as something brazen, unprecedented, and unacceptable, this time around it has become the new normal:

Political convention has successfully been defined down, and the Republicans’ stated intent to hold the debt-ceiling hostage again is being viewed as a matter of course. [...]
It’s one thing if this blitheness about the coming hostage-taking is contained within the Beltway. But if this perception starts to percolate out more broadly, the White House is in far weaker position heading into the next round than it would like to believe.

     'That’s my worry, too. And so this isn’t intended as a rhetorical question, but more as an invitation for suggestions: How exactly does the White House go about “not negotiating” here?'

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/01/04/the-morning-plum-what-does-not-negotiating-look-like/

     If this is true, then it seems that what this is a political fight-pr-to define what's going on and what's a stake. To the extent that the press is buying into a false narrative it's up to the liberals and the Obama Administration to call out this false spin.

     Sargent remains pessimistic:

      "Relatedly, Steve Benen makes a crucial point about the debt ceiling coverage:

One of the things I worry about at this stage is a false sense of routinization — much of the political world has already started to look at debt-ceiling fights as routine, which is the exact opposite of reality. It’s a manufactured crisis — and a legitimate national scandal — that was largely unthinkable before 2011, which the GOP hopes to normalize with the media’s help.

       "It’s unclear to me that there’s anything that will change this."

        I see this as building a narrative. The President and his Administration must not let anyone forget that the debt ceiling is inappropriate to use as any cudgel or bargaining chip. There is then the idea of the 14th Amendment option or the $1 trillion dollar platinum coin. What I don't get are the reports by Josh Marshall that the White House rules out the use of the 14th Amendment. No matter how the markets might react so such a thing surely it's better than a default?