Obviously, the Republican spin machine is going to be in full-on Blame the Dems mode in the next year with regard to the disastrous attempt to use the debt ceiling as bargaining chip to attain political concessions they could not get through an honest vote, as they only control one house of Congress.
The stock market is nose-diving, US bonds have been downgraded by one agency (Standard & Poors) and most everybody of all political stripes is dusgusted with the way the debate played out. If everyone knew the facts, the Republicans and the Tea Party will be held completely responsible for the whole mess, hopefully leading to massive electoral losses for both groups in the 2012 elections. But as we on the Dope know, everyone does not know the facts.
(I do not intend to argue whether or not the Republicans and Tea Partiers are fully to blame for the debt limit debacle, I consider any such arguments to be so very contrary to easily established facts that bringing them up is a form of sophistry intended to avoid furthering honest debate, essentially denying that 2+2=4 as a debating technique, if you will.)
It’s obvious to me that the Republicans will try to cast the Dems as responsible for the debacle, and they’ll use the Fox News/hate radio/conservative advertising money machine-based spin engine to get their message out, and let’s face it, they’ve been very effective at it.
As Der Trihs has pointed out, the Democratic Congressional leaders as a group have performed with the energy and inventiveness of reanimated corpses throughout the debate debacle, so it is left to us to figure out a way to get the message out that the Republicans and Tea Partiers are entirely to blame. How can we do it, especially given that most of us, hell, even me, are sick of hearing about the debt ceiling debate as it is?
The truth is that the Democrats were just as responsible for the debt ceiling disaster as the Republicans.
While the Republicans did use the debt ceiling as a bargaining tool, the Democrats are to blame for actually debating the Republicans on such ludicrous terms.
Throughout the whole debate I have not seen either Obama or any prominent Democrat make the case we need to raise taxes on the rich in order to fix this debt crisis. Instead they started from the center, meekly asked for revenue increases, and ended up agreeing to $2 trillion dollars in spending cuts.
While that’s better than Republicans, it’s still not worthy of any praise.
If I were Obama I would not talk about the debt ceiling debt with the hope of not accidentally reminding everyone of what a weak and ineffectual politician they elected.
So what you’re asking is how can the Dems make people see the world the way you see it? Regardless of how things are, it seems your fingers are stuck firmly in your ears and you have no interest in even considering the possibility that things might not be that way.
What I’d like to know is why the Mets can’t convince people they’re better than the Yankees, it’s just so obviously true. And what’s up with Jewish people, why can’t they accept that Jesus is the one true son of God, isn’t there a way for Christians to convince them?
The deal stunk by 98 percent and the people who voted against the bill were correct in doing so. If you think a bill is bad, you vote against it. How bad was it? 98 percent bad. John Boehner did us a great service in noting that his caucus got 98 percent of what it wanted. And the markets have spoken. Nothing the Republicans worship quite as much as the markets.
So if the Democrats were to be partisan enough to quote Boehner on the 98 percent, cite the markets tanking and the S&P downgrade on what happens when the Republicans get 98 percent of their way, then the Democrats will be going a long way to pointing out how badly the Republican caucus fucked the country.
I agree that the democratc are not blameless, they have shown no more willingness that the Republicans to do what needs to be done to tackle the deficit. However the most immediate short-term effects are entirely the result of Republcian manufacturing unneccesary poltical instabilty.
I said in the thread just before the deal was done the damage had already been done. By making the prospect of default slightly more of a reality with politcal posturing, it’s hardly rocket science to see that lenders will be less willing to invest in US debt.
considering they watered it down into a useless bill that did nothing for debt reduction I’d say there is no way they can spin their way out of it. They screwed us in the ass and they will suffer for it in the next election along with the Republicans who caved.
Live in a simpler time and place than we do. I guess. Fact is pols have to decide what their voters will do if they vote no. If his constituents want him to say no, and he can do it without blowing a bill, he will get approval for doing it. Even though the party says yes.
The world is a little more nuanced and complicated that just say vote yes.
so? I don’t think you grasp what happened in the last election. The Republicans were put on notice by their own voters. It wasn’t just a Democratic bitch slap. The writing is on the wall and no amount of spin from the mouths of Boehner or Kerry will smooth over this bill. We know which party supported what in the bill and the lack of backbone by the Republican party did not go unnoticed. That bill did nothing but throw coal into a steam engine headed for a cliff.
I think the GOP is very blame worthy primarily because of two reasons:
They could have had this debate back when we were negotiating the budget, that would have been a more appropriate time to draw a line in the sand and would have caused less issues than holding the debt ceiling hostage.
There were several points during this whole thing where we could have ended up with a $4 trillion deal if we had been willing to engage in the time honored tradition of compromise in which we give up some stuff in exchange for other stuff. I think a $4t deal was what was needed and would have still been more to the GOP’s favor than to the Dems.
However the OP’s characterization of the issue is a bit incorrect, too, and given he opens a thread in Great Debates in which he asserts factual/doctrinal absolute correctness with no room for disagreement on a matter entirely up to reasonable disagreement I would say the well is almost poisoned beyond repair from the get go.
President Obama wanted no reduction in the deficit at all, and over a month ago he just wanted the debt ceiling approved with no other requirements whatsoever. So to say this is all the fault of the Republicans is just wrong, if the GOP had gone along with Mr. Obama we probably would have had all three ratings agencies downgrade us–while S&P mentioned the political grid lock as a major factor, note what else they mentioned:
Our deficit reduction deal still leads us having a very high debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of this decade.
The lack of our ability to get a more meaningful deal accomplished shows our politicians are not very serious about reducing the deficit.
So if anything I think that it’s an absolute fact that if the GOP had just let Mr. Obama have his way, we still would have been downgraded and potentially by two other ratings agencies–because the original Democrat position was no adjustment of the deficit at all, period.
The biggest blame for this disaster definitely rests with the Tea Party, for tying Boehner’s hands and making us unable to agree on the fairly generous $4tn reduction deal that was on the table–Boehner was very much willing to sign that deal but Tea Party Republicans in the House were not.
In some ways I think the Tea Party wing’s borderline crazy obsession with massive spending cuts is good because it has at least forced the issue of reigning in spending to the forefront of policy discussion. Unfortunately the uncompromising nature of the Tea Party freshman reps essentially means they are incapable of being part of the solution long term (because they refuse to accept any revenue increases.) However it still is absolutely incorrect to say the people who wanted to just raise the ceiling with no long term reduction in spending built in at all would not have suffered the wrath of the market and the ratings agencies is partisan blindness at the worst.
I didn’t even say the word reduction in the section you quoted. Nor did I say we ended up with a good reduction package, just that it isn’t a bad thing the topic of doing something to reign in long term spending is very much worth talking about right now.
Given the currently poor state of the economy, I think the only responsible deficit reduction will be one that puts most of the reduction off to the future–the economy will not do well with dramatic spending cuts in the here and now.
If you want to argue whether or not the Dems or the Pubs were responsible, there is nothing preventing you from starting a thread along those lines. This thread is not for arguing that position. It ASSUMES that the Pubs are guilty, of course if you do not agree this is a pointless thread, if you do agree, there is no point in debating the position.
Well there is also Rush Limbaugh and the legions of conservative hate radio people, and the ability of wealthy backers to spend money like it was water to buy ads to promote their message, though I am seriously wondering if the wealthy backers are gonna be quite so forthcoming with their money after this debacle.
This issue doesn’t lend itself well to sound-bite campaigning.
Firstly, you need to make people understand that the debt limit isn’t about covering our asses for money we might allocate sometime in the future. It’s about paying for things we already bought. I think a lot people see “debt limit” and thing: Oh, they want to spend more money in the future. Well, this money is, for all practical purposes, already “spent”.
The next part is a little easier, since you can point out how many times the debt limit has been raised and how it was basically just something that has to be done. That once a budget is passed, we Americans should assume that we’re good for that money. And that the rest of world gets very nervous when we imply that we’re not.
Thirdly, whatever you do, don’t mention the time when Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling. You can talk about his vote being symbolic, and not something that threatened our credit rating, but it just doesn’t look good.