Visual Source: Newseum
Charlie Cook:
Republicans will be able to smugly walk away from the table knowing that they didn’t give an inch, but President Obama may well come out the winner. The public will see the president as having tried to negotiate a balanced approach whereby each side allowed its own ox to be gored and made sacrifices for the broader national good.
Washington will not succeed in bending the deficit and debt curve, and Obama will be able to blame Republicans for their unwillingness to meet Democrats halfway.
Mark Blumenthal:
Third, and perhaps most important, the Tea Party-first Republicans are not some minor faction within the Republican party. They are the heart and soul of its base, the most active and committed Republican voters.
Last November, Bill McInturff referred to the Tea Party-first Republicans as his party's "special forces elite troops." The middle group, he said, "are sort of like the regular army, and the Republicans that aren't the tea party are kind of the support staff far from the front lines."
The Republican leadership in Washington is currently stuck between the rock of their activist base and the hard place of their allies and benefactors in the business community who fear the consequences of a government default. These polling data tell us that their dilemma will not easily resolve.
They are the Bush dead-enders, the Nixon supporters even after Watergate. And they are a significant minority amongst all voters, albeit still a minority. Their influence is within the Republican Party alone. Defeating Republicans defeats them. Yet another reason to do so in 2012.
Jeff Greenfield writes an unlikely cautionary tale:
But on Sunday night, July 31, 2011, decades of toxic politics exploded. In the House Republican Caucus, freshman members of the Tea Party Caucus, threatened with primary challenges over insufficient budget-cutting zeal, joined with Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota in opposition to the deal. Among Democrats, virtually all 80 members of the Progressive Caucus lined up solidly against it. Even as they gathered for the critical vote, with its outcome in doubt, Fox News and MSNBC were both airing one-hour specials titled “Sellout!”
And with the measure five votes short as the count neared the end, several lawmakers signaled their intentions to switch their votes to no (“I’ll be damned,” said one, “if I’ll commit political suicide for a vote that’s going to lose anyway”).
The Republicans are insane (see Mark Blumenthal as to why), but this "it's both parties!" bullshit is just bullshit. In that scenario, Nancy Pelosi finds five votes if she has to, because unlike John Boehner, she's an actual leader. Still, some people remain enamored of third party fantasies that never materialize. It's a way of avoiding admitting that one party really is insane, and that our system permits it.
NY Times:
It was a piquant and immensely revealing moment. The conventional — and erroneous — perception of the gay-marriage issue is that it pits secular forces against religious ones. From New York to California, wherever and whenever the battle has flared, news coverage has focused almost entirely on the religious groups who uniformly denounce it: Mormons, Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians and many Hispanic Pentecostals and African-American Protestants.
Yet the passage of same-sex marriage in New York last month, just two years after its defeat here, attests to the concerted, sustained efforts by liberal Christian and Jewish clergy to advocate for it in the language of faith, to counter the language of morality voiced by foes. In so doing, they provided a kind of political and theological cover to the moderate and conservative state senators who cast the vital swing votes for a 33-to-29 margin.
Joe Nocera on the Fox-ification of the WSJ:
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification.
The other half is that Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, The Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too. ...
On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department.
Charles Blow:
Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.
They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.
No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.