To my mind, it's simple: Obama need not be any more ambitious in this fiscal wrestling match than preserving the status quo: when debt goes up, the ceiling is raised. He wins by default if he gets that. Getting tax concessions from the Republicans is icing on the cake. The more he stands pat, the better off he is. He can get away with being stubborn, because on this matter, getting what he wants is really the necessary thing for everyone, even the Republicans.
If the debt ceiling negotiations fail, everybody's screwed. The Republicans know it. Now some people, going into this, assumed that the Republicans have the stronger hand. In truth, though, they don't. They merely have the most ostentatious, most ambitious position. Unfortunately for them, they've been taking this position pretty much because they had to.
Their base is absolutely, fanatically devoted to getting actual results, after decades of promises. The Republicans are not taking such collosal spending cuts to the table because they think it's realistic, or good bargaining, or whatever. They're taking them to the table because they're scared they'll get primaried if they don't. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the key to the weakness in the Republican's bargaining position.
For all we curse the collaborators in the Senate, it is handy in this situation to have a chamber of Congress in our hands. Nothing gets passed into law unless it goes through that Senate. That means that the only viable deals are those that can pass the Democratic Senate.
Now Democrats have balked pretty much at touching the entitlement programs, but it's not like they have to rewrite the laws in order to keep them as they are. Barring any legislative changes, Obama and the other Democrats have merely to do nothing, and let nothing be done along that lines, and we'll win.
The GOP's position is nowhere near that easy. They have to pass major legislation, force major cuts to those entitlements. They have to defend in utter perfection the tax liabilities of their rich patrons, or the Club for Growth says they will have hell to pay. They can't give Democrats much of anything without pissing off their base.
But what the Democrats want? The only thing we absolutely ask for here, that we have to pass through Congress is the rise in the Debt Ceiling, enough to cover the debts of this country through the rest of 2012. Everything else, even the Tax cuts for the rich, will simply happen on its own, given the chance.
And guess what? In the end, it's even more political suicide to fail to raise the debt ceiling than it is to piss of the people in the Tea Party. Between Financial Apocalypse and ticking off the Tea Party, ticking off the Tea Party, even the base, is the preferred outcome.
The brilliance of our position here is that our ambitions are ground-state ambitions. We don't have to push for anything especially incredible, after the debt ceiling is raised, we only have to let things fall into place.
The stupidity of the Republican Position is plainly this: in order to win, they would have to force everybody else to willingly sacrifice their own interests, win a political victory unlike anything anybody's won in decades, in order to really and trully win.
And that was never going to happen. Not looking at the past few years. Look at the government shutdown negotiations. If the prospect of the political fallout from a government shutdown was enough to panic the Republicans towards taking a ridiculous deal, how was the prospect of an economic and fiscal disaster unlike anything in American history going to stack up?
The debt ceiling was, and is going to be raised. The only position that require an active act of Congress was always going to be one that would be done, no matter what.
That means that the only thing Democrats had to do was wait, and wear down the optimism and spirit of the Republicans, to show the Republicans that they couldn't use the debt ceiling to bully us into political suicide. Once that became apparent, once the leaked reports had the test balloon going over like a non-Mythbusters lead balloon, the Republicans had no ability to deliver what they promised.
The apparent power that came with holding the nation hostage turned out to be a double-edged sword, because in holding the nation hostage, they were holding themselves hostage as well. Once it was clear that the psychological threat of not raising the debt ceiling wasn't budging the Democrats, they knew they couldn't get themselves out of this situation without simply giving the Democrats what they wanted in the first place.
Ah, but if they couldn't get their spending cuts without tax increases, then the only thing they have left to offer us is the Debt Ceiling.
But with the Debt Ceiling vote, we get everything we want: an end to the debt crisis, the continuation of Medicare and Social Security benefits, the lapsing of the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich, no big spending decreases.
Nothing's set in stone yet, but I believe the Republicans have lost, and they've lost because they sought the most radical changes with a threat too terrible to carry out. The whole system was stacked against them to begin with. Obama's brilliance has been in getting us to a position where all the things we want out of the deal are as simple to get as rolling off a log, where the one thing we need to win is the one thing the Republicans have to commit a huge act of political suicide and national economicide to avoid giving us.