You know, in a way the Ds are right - the Tea Party is to blame for the downgrade. For Two years the Obama Administration was spending $3 for every $2 they collected and it took the Paul Ryan and the Tea Party to point out to these geniuses at S&P how unsustainable it all was?

Quiet as church mice were they until the debt ceiling fight. And I bet that had the 2010 election not gone the way it did and the Ds were in control and passed a clean rise in the ceiling without any fight S&P would still be silent.

It was a joint effort by Republicans and Democrats. Any Republican or Democrat who claims otherwise is wrong.

See the drowning man clutch at everyone else as he goes down.

But that isn't true. Many Republicans support reigning in the EPA and labor board. To remove government impedance to job creation. They object to raising taxes on small businesses where most of the job creation comes from. When more people work, then tax revenue increases. Unless you were ignoring all that and were only talking about jacking up taxes. If so, never mind.

Democrats believed raising the debt ceiling was all that needed to be done because their answer to every problem is to throw more money at it. Whether borrowing it from those who have it or confiscating it from those who earned it, Demcorats want more money coming in to support the spending they can't stop.

And sadly the beltway republicans are just as suprised, because they thought all they had to do to avoid a downgrade was pretend to cut the budget ten years from now.

Here's an excellent analysis of deception and denial, given by Ronald Reagan's former solicitor-general:

"When John Boehner at the height of the debt ceiling crisis answered [Obama] on the national media he simply did not tell the truth. He said that the president would not compromise, would not take yes for an answer, and wanted it all his own way.

But he cannot have forgotten that he had negotiated Obama into far more cuts than Obama and his caucus had wanted, thought wise or even palatable in return for a modest increase in revenue to be achieved by closing egregious and unfair loopholes in personal and corporate taxes. This is the same compromise recommended by the “Gang of Six,” which included the extremely conservative and admirably patriotic Senator Tom Coburn, by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson group, and by Republican economists like Martin Feldstein.

It was the Speaker who, Arafat-like, walked away from that deal because he concluded he lacked the skill or the muscle or the spine to sell it to his own caucus."

- Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan's solicitor-general.

Perhaps you can link to the budget that you seem to think Obama proposed that would have saved us from a downgrade.

In any event, according to press reports which seem uncontradicted (feel free to post some to the contrary), Boehner and Obama had agreed on $800k of revenue increases, which apparently did not include rate changes, and changes in the age of eligility for entitlement. The former would undoubtedly have been a hard sell, but what caused the negotiations to fail was that the Dem leadership instructed Obama that the entitlement age change had to be dropped and the tax increase had to be $1.2M, presumably including rate increases. This appears to be what Boehner referred to as moving the goalposts, past the point where the speaker had the votes.

So it appears to me to be Fried who may be stretching the truth.

But that I think the Harvard prof's larger point is that he liked the Gang of Six proposal or maybe even the Simpson Bowles proposal better than what came out. Not to endorse either (both were mixed bags), but fine, those were already compromise proposals. While Obama said he liked Go6, though, he did nothing to get it passed with the Senate. He never put it in play - he could not even get his own party to support it (it was full of nonstarters with the Democrats). And it is doubtful he ever intended to. So if Go6 was not accepted, Fried should look to the weak leadership in the White House for abandoning it and doing whatever other things he thought he was doing in the negotiations. Maybe if Obama had some goal in mind other than getting the debt ceiling off the table until after his next election, he might have done something more to Fried's liking.

The lead democrats strike the pose of some among us who are up to their eyeballs in credit card debt - the solution that is obvious to them is to secure another credit card and keep on spending. This is as tenderly insane as believing in the existence of perpetual motion machines and unicorns that excrete jelly beans and pink lemonade.