Visual Source: Newseum
Matthew Dowd:
The best-case scenario for these politicians is not that somebody will “win,” but only that victory can be defined as losing less than someone else. So with no winners in any of this, an increasingly frustrated and anxious public will turn further away from the federal government and our leaders in Washington as a place to find answers. The public has sent wake-up alarm after wake-up alarm to politicians, and many of those politicians keep hitting the snooze button and thinking they can spin their way out of this.
Nate Silver:
The downside case, rather, would have been if Mr. Boehner’s bill had received not one or two dozen potential Republican objections — but, say, 100 of them. Democrats might have thought of this as a major tactical defeat for Mr. Boehner. But it would also have called into question whether the House had a sufficient number of votes to pass any type of debt ceiling legislation at all. That risk now seems lessened. We still have a ways to go, but in my view the possibility of a debt default has substantially declined.
Everyone loses and something passes. For that reason, why do it again?
Ed Kilgore:
A big part of the paper-tiger nature of progressive protests against Obama’s policies and politics has been the absence of any mass base for a serious revolt. Until such time as Democratic (or Democratic-leaning independent) liberal voters begin to share elite anger toward the incumbent, then all the thundering from thinkers and writers on the left (or even from staunch Progressive Caucus members in Congress) represents little more than a standing invitation to be "triangulated" by a White House seeking swing voter approbation.
And that’s why the headline accompanying the new CNN poll -- "Drop in liberal support pushes Obama approval rating down" -- is arousing fresh hopes of the left finally obtaining some political leverage over the administration at a critical moment in the budget/debt limit brouhaha.
But they are probably false hopes.
Joe Gandelman:
I’ve often written about or noted how Democratic Party liberals tend to go after their own Presidents in primaries, or stay home when they don’t like something their party does. Then they spend the next few years shocked about how the GOP seems to be taking over the courts more and more, seems to get a bigger foothold in controlling the Supreme Court, gets its members entrenched in the democracy and how Republican office holders on the national and state levels know how to use (some will say abuse) power when they get it — political power and the use of an office to dominate a narrative.
Is it about to happen again? It sounds that way.
But only because it's Andrew Malcolm, who always sounds that way.
Sam Stein:
The debt ceiling debate has provided yet another opportunity for Democratic base voters to lament the political choices of the president they helped elect. A Washington Post-ABC poll released this week found that the number of liberal Democrats who strongly supported President Obama's record on jobs had fallen an astonishing 22 percentage points over the course of a year, from 53 percent to 31 percent. The prioritization of spending cuts over job creation -- not rhetorically, but in terms of governance -- was likely the primary contributor.
But as in similar moments in the past, such as the loss of the public option in the health care debate, the failure to end Bush-era tax cuts on high-earning Americans, and last spring's government shutdown showdown, voters' disappointments in policy choices are not translating to serious problems for Obama's reelection campaign.
President Obama currently enjoys a higher popularity among Democratic voters than every Democratic president dating back to Harry Truman had at similar junctures in their presidencies.
But.. but...
Josh Kraushaar:
Those polls are even more ominous for the president: In every reputable battleground state poll conducted over the past month, Obama’s support is weak. In most of them, he trails Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. For all the talk of a closely fought 2012 election, if Obama can’t turn around his fortunes in states such as Michigan and New Hampshire, next year’s presidential election could end up being a GOP landslide.
Yo, Josh, we don't even know it is Mitt.
But...
A week after one poll showed Republican Mitt Romney with a slight lead over President Barack Obama in a head-to-head matchup in Michigan, another poll shows Obama ahead of Romney in the state.
Public Policy Polling in North Carolina released a poll today showing Obama leads Romney 47% to 42% and has a double-digit lead over other potential Republican candidates he may face in next year’s presidential race.
It's July, ok?
Ari Melber:
This fight started with a partisan threat to sabotoge the economy in order to extract policy concessions, but then, when Democrats offered most of the concessions, it ricocheted and morphed into something else: a high-stakes lightning round of intramural GOP posturing. Right now, we are living through a Republican primary for economic policy. The results may hurt the nation—an externality that Republicans have widely acknowledged, lending bite to their bark—and no one seems to know what you do with an army that wants to keep fighting after there's no land left to conquer.
One might quibble with some details and word choices, but that's the basic story. It's gripping, it's scary, and it's not anything close to the press's story about this debt fight. Take this headline, running at the top of CNN a day after President Obama's national address:
"They're all talking, but no one is compromising, at least publicly. Democratic and GOP leaders appear unwilling to bend on proposals to raise the debt ceiling."
Journalist Josh Marshall confronted that bizarro narrative with evidence of what's actually happening. "By any reasonable measure, this [CNN headline] is simply false, even painfully so," he notes. "Even the firebreathers on the Republican side aren't suggesting this..."
And the winner of the
2011 Bulwer-Lytton Prize for deliberately awful writing:
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
Sue Fondrie
Oshkosh, WI
Prof. Fondrie is the 29th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his “Paul Clifford” with “It was a dark and stormy night.”