Former Rep. Artur DavisFormer congressman (D-Ala.); Partner said:
Let’s assume that sometime this weekend, Barack Obama and John Boehner will cut a debt ceiling deal that is neither “grand” nor wildly popular. Obama will tout the fact that he has eliminated certain corporate tax deductions in exchange for entitlement changes that neither gut nor privatize Medicare. Boehner will argue that he has secured the biggest one time federal reduction in spending in the post horse-and-buggy era, and that he has stood firm against any spike in marginal tax rates.
Then something will ensue that I remember from the end-game on TARP in the fall of 2008. In a frantic effort to reverse the political calculations of congressmen who want to vote “no” while rooting for “yes”, the most dire economic consequences will be assigned to failure. For that reason, as well as the ability of politicians to construe a best case for their choices from the polls they read, a default will narrowly be averted.
Then each side will likely spend the rest of this year dealing with the following: the economy has stagnated and the July job numbers may be the worst since December. A deal will juice the markets for a few days, but not stimulate consumer purchasing. That means that the drumbeat in the dying days of summer will be the very live prospect of Recession 2.0. The public, which is never fond of the argument that “we kept even worse things from happening”, will be prone to dismiss the debt deal as one more Washington maneuver that missed their lives.
Second, the bases of both sides are about to get angrier. The economic jitters will spur liberals to warn that we have elevated austerity over job creation, and the president who allegedly made that choice will find his own troops more restless than ever. Among Republicans, Rick Perry will bound into the presidential arena with the promise that compromising with “tax and spend liberals’” violates the Texas way and won’t happen on his watch; none of his rivals will see much upside in defending the deal either.
The upshot: an electorate that has more freely floating anger than we have seen in memory, one that views Washington as inadequate to the task at hand. Twenty years ago, a mood that was not as toxic but just as unsettled produced a fundamentally unserious blowhard named Ross Perot as a genuine presidential prospect. He got in, dropped out, got back in before he settled out at 19% of the vote in a country that was much less wired and much harder to mobilize than the one we have now.
For reason rooted in voter habits and cost, I am not yet in the camp that thinks a third party is ready to alter American history (in a selected state, where both parties have run aground, the prospect is very much tomorrow’s story). But something coarse is starting to happen in our politics. There is a risk of the system going awry next year and another dangerous, unserious possibility flourishing. Is 2012 going to be when our politics crashed and burned?
