Hope and change in a magic tea
pot
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com,
Now the real fun begins. Assuming that the debt deal
has been effectively sealed—and it began to look
more likely once the House voted “yes” by a
comfortable margin Monday evening—all that’s left is
deciding who won the fight over raising the debt
limit.
House Speaker John Boehner, who spent the day Monday
with his whips and nose-counters successfully
rounding up enough votes to keep the “seal” on the
deal from coming apart at the edges, concedes that
“it’s not the greatest deal in the world. But it
shows how much we’ve changed the terms of the debate
in this town. There is nothing in this framework
that violates our principles. It’s all spending
cuts.”
For once the conservatives, both the Tea Party
variety and the mainstream conservatives, didn’t
buckle in the face of the media condescension that
usually makes girlie men of Republicans in tight
places. When girlie men get to Washington and see
themselves surrounded on all sides by boogermen of
the left and under constant sniper fire from the
pipsqueaks, they usually mistake the noise of
pipsqueakery for the voice of the people who sent
them to Congress. Buckling under pressure seemed the
better part of what passes for valor in these parts.
Mr. Obama resorted coarsely to class warfare,
painting an image of orphanages closed and nursing
homes emptied.
The liberal pundits—the “progressives,” as liberals
insist on calling themselves since they royally
stunk up the word “liberal”—tried to label the Tea
Party conservatives as knaves, kooks and cleaned-up
Ku Kluxers, to drive them into sullen silence as in
the past. This time that didn’t work. The pundits,
like the Democrats in Congress, are in a pout
because the “sealed” deal doesn’t raise taxes, and
cuts deep into the blubberhood where big government
lives. Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist
who lives in an academic bubble as a tenured
professor at Princeton, protected from the rough and
robust reality of the real world, complains that he
doesn’t understand why everyone is talking about
cutting the size of government, anyway. The skin on
his nose is intact.
“We’ve got these budget cuts which are
entirely—basically the Republicans said, ‘We’ll blow
up the world economy unless you give us exactly what
we want.’ And the president said, ‘OK.’ That’s what
happened.” (When you have a Nobel Prize similar to
the one the Swedes and the Norwegians gave President
Obama for merely being a nice guy, you don’t have to
speak in coherent sentences.)
President Obama arrived in Washington with schemes
and dreams of blowing a bubble big enough to protect
everyone from reality, whether they wanted to live
in a bubble or not, but he didn’t understand that he
was arriving just as the party was coming to its
drunken conclusion. While Congress squirmed to an
agreement on debt “relief,” trying to scratch as
many itches as it could, Mr. Obama hid out at the
White House, dreaming his dreamy dreams of
ever-grander grandiloquence and desperate to stay
out of the line of fire. He didn’t get the new taxes
he wanted but he got an extension of the debt limit,
enabling him to whistle past the 2012 graveyard. He
can resurrect all that hopey-changey stuff during
the re-election campaign and make everybody forget
about all that economic stuff.
The president tried to take a victory lap Monday,
hogging as much credit as he dared for an agreement
sealed but not delivered, and rewriting a little
recent history. The White House put out a statement
remarkable for its cheap piety, celebrating an
agreement that “removes the cloud of uncertainty
over our economy at this critical time, ensuring
that no one will be able to use the threat of the
nation’s first default . . . for political
gain.”
There were no regrets, even implied, for the
president’s coarse resort to class warfare “for
political gain,” his threat that unless he prevailed
in the debt crisis debate Granny would not get her
Social Security check. He painted a vision of
orphanages closed, nursing homes emptied of the old
and infirm, gridlocking the Interstates with
children crying for bread and the starving geezers
on walkers and crutches. These were pitiable scenes
not seen since the Bataan Death March. Oh, the pity
of it all.
But this time the Republicans and other
conservatives did not flinch, their spines stiffened
by courage taken from the tea pot. Washington hasn’t
seen a panic like this since Beauregard sent the
Federal army scrambling back to Washington from
Manassas battlefield in the summer of ‘61. This was
the change we’ve been hoping for.