And promise to do it well ahead of the deadline unless Team Teabilly comes to its senses and stops behaving like children playing with matches at a NASCAR pit stop. Why? First, "market confidence." Hey, it's been invoked to justify everything from bank bailouts to quantitative easing to Fed asset purchases, etc., and in this case at least, it seems entirely apropos. I mean, if you want to watch the bond fairies get twitchy and the Fed begin to lose its grip on its inflation targets, just leave everybody in the financial markets guessing for the next few weeks whether Sam intends to keep paying his creditors or whether he's going to shut down the cigar store and take an indefinite vacation. Bond holders just want to get paid, and traders just want their damn commissions. Let them know they've got nothing to worry about, and the markets will snooze their way through the entire episode.
Second, no one, but no one, made money the last couple of years betting on the sanity of Republicans. I've got news for some of the coin-phobics out there, but if you really think the Republican Party rank and file are going to listen when the chips are down to John Boehner or Eric Cantor or Mitch McConnell, I have to break the news to you. Those people are not the GOP's true leadership elite: it's Limbaugh and Hannity and Arpaio and Norquist, and the people at Drudge and Breitbart and Fox & Friends and NRO. They have acted and behaved like terrorists since the President was elected, and there is no reason to assume this time will be any different.
Third, the blame game. Sure, the bomb-throwers will bear the brunt at first, but how long would a protracted shutdown last before some serious persons at Time or Politico started wondering out loud why Obama isn't being more flexible in the face of hundreds of thousands of projected job losses each month? Shit, Dancin' Dave and his merry minions on Meet The Press will be pushing that line five minutes after the default is announced. When it comes to winning the battle for public opinion, we have to make policy arguments based on the media culture we have, not the media culture we would like to have.
And that's why this isn't the time or place to break the Republican Party. That, unfortunately, can only be accomplished piecemeal over the next few election cycles. In the end, the debt ceiling is just another GOP-manufactured crisis. If the President engages them on it in an adversarial fashion, he's playing on their court and by their rules. The best way to deal with grenade-throwers is to defuse the device before they have a chance to pull the pin.
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Baron V