Jim Newton:
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, he came to office convinced that among the obligations he assumed was that of calming the nation. His predecessors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, had governed through a series of crises and calamities — World War II, the Berlin Crisis, the Soviet atomic bomb, the Korean War, the 1952 steel strike — and Ike believed that Washington's fixation with crisis was unsettling to the American people and destabilizing to the economy.
With that in mind, he set out to project an aura of calm command, and consistently sought a place between the anti-communist Republicans who anchored the right wing of his party and the New Deal Democrats who pulled that party to its left. It was, Eisenhower liked to say, his "Middle Way," a "practical working basis between extremists" arrived at through patient and temperate negotiation.
Bill Boyarsky:
Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”
Since Eisenhower was president? That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education, including Head Start.
Robert Scheer:
To cut federal expenditures in the midst of a deep and persistent recession would have been viewed as madness by every modern Republican president, from Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Reagan to both Bushes. Ronald Reagan had no qualms about doubling the entire national debt that had been accumulated by all previous presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter. […]
Neither party has ever dared to use the deficit ceiling to blackmail the entire nation—until now. And for that, the GOP is the party clearly at fault. But it is also true that, in his zeal for centrist consensus, a preoccupation doomed to failure in a time of tough choices, it was Barack Obama who folded.
John Nichols:
[I]f Obama had not gotten the debt-ceiling deal, the markets would have tanked.
That was the calculus at the White House, and among the Democrats who made the mistake of backing Obama as he veered far to the right in the debt-ceiling negotiations.
Unfortunately, it was wrong. Not just morally wrong. Not just politically wrong. Not just economically wrong. It was wrong with regard to the cherished markets.
Lawrence Kudlow says there won't be a recession, LOOK! at all those corporate profits.
Paul Krugman doesn't seem to have read Kudlow:
It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery. […]
The point is that it’s now time — long past time — to get serious about the real crisis the economy faces. The Fed needs to stop making excuses, while the president needs to come up with real job-creation proposals. And if Republicans block those proposals, he needs to make a Harry Truman-style campaign against the do-nothing G.O.P.
Ben Shapiro:
There was no emergency on the horizon. As Kevin Williamson of National Review pointed out, our revenues for the rest of the year easily would have paid our debt service requirements. We would have had to cut back on our discretionary and entitlement spending, but we need to do that anyway if we want to survive the current fiscal crisis.
Michael O’Hanlon, one of the "liberal" architects of the Iraq war, wrong again.
John Paul Smith:
One year ago, when Honeywell International locked me and 228 of my brothers and sisters from its plant in Metropolis, Ill., I never dreamed that I would end up explaining what happened in Germany and Belgium. But that's where the fight—which officially ended this week, when we accepted a new three-year contract that keeps seniority provisions and creates 21 new jobs—led me.
Many members in locals across the country, including my own, question the importance and relevance of building relationships with labor unions in other parts of the world. Hopefully, my experience during 13 months of being locked out will put these doubts to rest.
Newsday editorial writers must be smoking something good:
It's worth remembering all this as the drumbeat of grim economic news continues—lest we forget that, eventually, the music will change, and the dancing will resume.