Obama’s press conference today confirmed that he believes the only way the U.S. government can reassure the world about its ability to repay its debts is to raise the debt ceiling more, so they can borrow more.

America, you cannot complain about “partisan divisions” when you have two parties who assess our finances in such a diametrically opposed manner. To hear Obama and some Democrats tell it, there just isn’t any spending that can be cut outside of the Pentagon.

Fresh off raising income taxes on the rich and a payroll-tax hike (expiration of a cut, really) that hit everyone, Obama also framed the coming debt-ceiling debate as “tax breaks for the rich” and spending on “roads and bridges.” Either the January tax hike didn’t happen in his mind, or he was on rhetorical autopilot.

“I don’t think anyone would find my position unreasonable,” said the man who, as senator, voted against raising the debt ceiling.

After several prickly answers, Obama dismissed the idea that partisan divisions are exacerbated by how rarely he interacts with the opposition socially: “I’m a pretty friendly guy,” he declared.

In the Friday edition of the Morning Jolt newsletter:

Are Conservatives Really Complaining About the Lack of Diversity in Obama’s Cabinet?

So . . . do those of us on the Right really care if Obama’s cabinet is a bunch of white men?

I understand the joy of playing the diversity card on a Democratic administration, particularly against a president supported by activists who cry “racism” over just about any statement any Republican makes anywhere, anytime. Yes, it’s yet another epic double standard, one egregious enough to spur some tense exchanges between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski the other morning.

But do we genuinely feel that there are a lot of really good female or minority candidates — whom Obama would plausibly select, not the Righty folks we would have preferred — who were passed over for John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, John Brennan, and Jack Lew? The only name I’ve heard mentioned was Michele Flournoy instead of Hagel; she served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012. Do any of us honestly believe that a racial or gender bias against women and minorities is shaping Obama’s picks?

I’m all for playing political hardball. But if we think the country and media are too obsessed with pigeonholing people and seeing them and defining them through the lenses of race and gender, doesn’t our current nyahh-nyahh piling-on feed the beast?

Or is it that with Obama’s 2008 election having been proven to be not much of an improvement for race relations, and with knee-jerk cries of racism probably even more common than they were before Obama’s rise to the top of American politics, we’ve given up on a genuinely colorblind society? Or is it that by playing the not-diverse-enough card, we feel like we’re illuminating how petty and absurd it is to evaluate the quality of a president’s cabinet by the amount of melanin in the skin and which genitals its members have?

Back in 1992-93, President Bill Clinton fumed about “bean counters” playing “quota games.” But instead of backing off, the Democratic party and the Left became even more obsessed with emphasizing that only blacks could serve the interests of black citizens, women for women, and so on. After all, something spurred Elizabeth Warren to decide to self-identify as Native American while at Harvard, based on family tales and “high cheekbones.”

Remember, Obama ran an ad last year declaring simply, “Mitt Romney: He’s not one of us.”

This assessment from Ed Morrissey makes me think it’s that ultimately we think the obsessions of the Left’s Diversity Police are contradictory, impossible to live up to, and nonsensical. Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

We can argue with this bean-counting point of view, but the White House can’t. They ran on this bean-counting point of view, making fun of Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment that overlooked his more successful effort to produce gender balance on his gubernatorial cabinet in Massachusetts. They are being hoist by their own petard . . .

The most amusing part of this entire problem is that Obama had an opportunity to defuse it before it erupted. Rather than pick Chuck Hagel, seen mainly as a way to stick a thumb in the eye of Republicans, he could have promoted Michelle Fluornoy at Defense instead. Not only would that have interrupted the monochromatic (monogenderic, anyway) parade that has caught the media’s attention, it would have arguably been a much better choice anyway, and one much less likely to create controversy in the confirmation process.

Perhaps what we relish about this is that it illuminates how phony most of the traditional cries for diversity are. In the end, the “bean counters” always back down for Democratic presidents.

One person who’s authentic in her anger over this is Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers:

“I consider myself a feminist,” Powers began, “but then when I watched what went on during the election and the way Mitt Romney was treated, and this sort of hypocrisy where the ‘binders full of women’ was really ridiculed, and he was treated like he was a misogynist.” However, she said, when “you see a picture like this with President Obama, and you have the left basically making excuses for him.”

She cited Ruth Marcus calling the lack of females “bad, but not an outrage.” In response, Powers said, “Really? Because it’s an outrage if it’s a Republican. And I think that this is why when they survey women, and they ask them, ‘Do you consider yourself a feminist,’ most women say no because the feminist movement is just so one-sided. It’s always carrying water for the Democrats.”

“I can tell you, from working in Democratic politics, and having worked in the Clinton White House and so on, that this is something that Democratic women will complain about behind the scenes. If you look at pictures of President Bush, Condoleezza Rice is always by his side. You look at a picture after 9/11, it has Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Condoleezza Rice in the picture. Bill Clinton’s inner circle were all men, pretty much mostly white men. And I think the issue is that if you’re going to go out and claim that you are the party of women, I mean give me a break. There are no women? It’s ridiculous.” . . .

Matt Cooper with the inconvenient truth about how Washington perceives diversity: “Hiring more Ivy Leaguers who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard — whether they take a house in African-American-rich Oak Bluffs, like Valerie Jarrett, or own in whiter up-island like Steve Rattner — isn’t really widening your horizon that much.“

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt . . .

Meet Our New Treasury Secretary Nominee, Mr. Doodling Know-It-All

And another cabinet slot gets filled:

President Obama plans to nominate White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew as his next Treasury secretary, choosing a trusted adviser with deep experience in the nation’s budget challenges and in the legislative warfare that will test Obama’s second term, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ed Morrissey:

So much for that private-sector outreach in 2011-2, eh? Lew’s predecessor as chief of staff, William Daley, was supposed to facilitate connections to the private sector. Instead of getting a Treasury Secretary with extensive experience in financial markets, we’re going to get one with extensive experience in expanding government control and manipulation of markets. I’ll bet Wall Street will be overjoyed with this development . . . but probably not surprised.

Capital New York:

Lew reportedly angered both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner during the administration’s debt ceiling battle in 2011. The New York Times, in aprofile last month, said those negotiations “ended uncharacteristically badly” and that Boehner’s office viewed him “as an uncompromising know-it-all.”

So when President Obama delegated the lead role in the latest fiscal cliff negotiations to the current Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, it was widely seen as a move to preserve the remaining goodwill toward Lew, in advance of his appointment.

Say, what kind of reputation does Lew have on the Hill?

Several Republicans said Tuesday they don’t view Lew as a man interested in hearing GOP concerns. One aide called him “tone deaf” in understanding the compromises that Republicans could accept during high-stakes talks.

“No matter what you’re proposing or no matter what compromise you’re trying to forge, he comes at it from a position of, ‘Whatever you want, I have to be against,’” the GOP aide said. “It doesn’t advantage him in the negotiation, he doesn’t get a different policy outcome than he would otherwise. It just irritates people. . . . It’s as much personality as anything else.”

[Nebraska Sen. Mike] Johanns said it’s also about policy, saying a Lew choice would be “controversial.”

“I just think there are economic policies in this administration that haven’t been well received, and Jack Lew is in the middle of that,” he said.

“We’ve got to have a person who has credibility with the leaders of the American and world economy, someone who has credibility with the Congress, and I would feel like Mr. Lew’s nomination would be a mistake,” [Alabama Sen. Jeff] Sessions said.

Finally, our currency could soon feature a signature that looks like this:

Kevin Roose of New York magazine says the scribble that represents Lew’s actual signature reminds him of:

– a Slinky that has lost its spring

– one of those Crazy Straws you get at Six Flags

– Sally Brown’s hair in Peanuts

– a slip of paper in Office Max that people use to try out new pens

Frank J.: “According to handwriting analysis, Jack Lew has the mental capacity of a five-year-old — high for an Obama appointee.”

Because the subscribers seem to enjoy it, one more bit from today’s Morning Jolt:

Richard Cohen, hits the Washington Post op-ed page this morning with a heaping serving of conventional wisdom and gobbledygook on the president’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense:

The very best thing about Obama’s choice of Hagel for the Pentagon is that the president did not back down, as he did with Susan Rice.

Really? That’s the very best thing about him? Not his qualifications, or his intellect, or his sterling record of good judgment or his innovative approach to ensuring the security of the American people? Really? The very best thing about this nomination is that it makes Obama and his fans feel good about themselves, about their willingness to disregard contrary voices and criticism? When you think about it, isn’t that just about the most damning thing you can say about the Hagel pick? That he’s really good for the feelings of everyone in the administration? That he helps repair all of that self-esteem that was bruised by the Susan Rice mess?

With defenders like these, Chuck Hagel doesn’t need critics.

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features a look at how Chuck Hagel is the president’s “self-esteem pick” for the Pentagon, how the president compares his performance to that of a major actress, and then this bit of unreal reality…

Fiscal Insanity Is Now the Coin of the Realm

I’ll let Stephen Green get you up to speed:

In case you missed it, yes, there have been calls for the Treasury to mint itself a platinum coin, stamp a one and a dozen zeroes on it, and call it money. Yes, Tim Geithner has the Constitutional authority to do so. Yes, he’d be removing a trillion dollars from productive use by the stealth tax of inflation.

To date, most of the idiots and vile progs (but I repeat myself) hopping on this particular bandwagon have been low-level blogger types. Like me, but viler and even dumber. Now they have Paul Krugman on their side, which will drum up big support in Blue States where political idiocy is what people have with their coffee every morning.

I’ll give you a moment for your head to stop spinning. Now, our Dan Foster lays out a couple reasons why this is a bad idea:

Of course, there’s a hitch or two in the plan to mint The Coin. For one thing, numismatizing the debt by striking trillion-dollar debt discs is not exactly what former representative Mike Castle (R., Del.) had in mind in 1995 when he introduced the legislation that turned into the provision in public law 104-208. Dylan Matthews of theWashington Post tracked down this “unsuspecting godfather” of the platinum gambit, and Castle confirmed as much. “That was never the intent of anything that I drafted or that anyone who worked with me drafted,” Castle told Matthews. Indeed, the legislation was designed to give the Treasury flexibility to create more affordable platinum coins for collectors. To use that authority to backdoor the 17th and 18th trillion dollars of the national debt would be, according to Castle, “so far-fetched and so black helicopter-ish a type of methodology of trying to resolve something like this that I think the public would totally scoff at it.”

Some on the left understand this. Take, for instance, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who flatly titles a post on the subject “No, a $1 Trillion Platinum Coin Is Not Legal.” Drum, doubting there is enough of the requisite straitjacket brand of strict constructionism in the U.S. court system to uphold such a tortured reading of the statute, dismisses the ploy as “the kind of thing that Herman Cain would come up with” (the dread reductio ad Hermanum, a conversation-stopper in progressive circles).

They say that because the coin isn’t meant for general circulation – “hey, can anybody make change for a trillion?” – it won’t be inflationary. Yet like a lot of folks with a lot more financial savvy than myself, I’m a bit wary of telling the world financial markets, “hey, don’t worry about the U.S. federal government’s ability to pay for everything that it wants to buy and to pay back the unimaginable sums it has borrowed; we’ve got a magic trillion dollar coin now, so we’ve got a trillion bucks more than we did a little while ago.”

And Dan explains why he thinks this idea is going nowhere: “If the president minted The Coin, it might win him a few cheers from the same folks on the professional left who have called him a wuss for four years. But it would convince just about everybody else that he’s back on the Choom Gang. That’s why it won’t ever happen unless the luck of the GOP is as good in 2013 as it was bad in 2012.”

For what it’s worth, at least one Republican congressman wants to make such a move illegal:

U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) today announced plans to introduce a bill to stop a proposal to mint high-value platinum coins to pay the federal government’s bills.

“Some people are in denial about the need to reduce spending and balance the budget. This scheme to mint trillion dollar platinum coins is absurd and dangerous, and would be laughable if the proponents weren’t so serious about it as a solution. I’m introducing a bill to stop it in its tracks,” Rep. Walden said.

“My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air. We sat down and figured out how to balance the books. That’s what Washington needs to do as well. My bill will take the coin scheme off the table by disallowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins as a way to pay down the debt. We must reduce spending and get our fiscal house in order,” Rep. Walden said.

Frank J.: “If you put a trillion dollar coin into a soda vending machine, you now own all soda manufacturers.”

Here’s a fun question for Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing: does he still support reinstating the draft, as he suggested in 2004?

Speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on post-occupation Iraq, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said, “There’s not an American … that doesn’t understand what we are engaged in today and what the prospects are for the future.”

Hagel, a member of the committee, says all Americans should be involved in the effort.

“Why shouldn’t we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?” Hagel said, arguing that restoring the draft would force “our citizens to understand the intensity and depth of challenges we face.”

The senator also argued re-instituting the draft, which ended in the early ’70s, would cause the burden of military service to be spread among all economic classes of people.

“Those who are serving today and dying today are the middle class and lower middle class,” he claimed.

While the Iraq war is over, what Hagel described at that hearing remains in place today — those in the military are middle class and lower middle class, and they are serving and dying in Afghanistan.

Hagel later said he wasn’t directly advocating reinstating the draft but that he wanted a national debate on the subject, contending he’s “not so sure it’s a bad idea.” He also supported the idea of “mandatory national service” for all Americans.

One simple question for the upcoming Hagel hearings: would a Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel be willing to order U.S. forces to either assist Israel in a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, or order U.S. forces to execute that strike directly?

(I foresee in the comments section many folks arguing the merits of the idea, but the point is separate from that debate; the point is whether or not Hagel is able to enact options that the president himself has repeatedly stated are “on the table.” Or is the president announcing, with Hagel, that those options are no longer on the table?)

If the answer to either of those is “no” – that Hagel’s conscience and personal policy beliefs mean he could not, in good conscience, give either of those orders, and that he would resign rather than carry out an order from the president to do that — then we have a Secretary of Defense who is going to have to be replaced in the event of a crisis along these lines. It’s a bad idea to have a Secretary of Defense who can only serve the president as long as the president forecloses certain already-discussed options.

From the first Morning Jolt of the first full week of 2013…

The Hagel Hullabaloo: Conflict-Hungry President Picks His Next Fight

It’s official: “President Obama plans to nominate former senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and Vietnam veteran, to be secretary of defense on Monday, according to a person close to the process and a senior administration official. The White House informed the Hagel camp over the weekend that Obama intends to announce the nomination at the White House on Monday.”

So, how does that confirmation fight look?

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican freshman from Texas elected with strong backing from the tea party, said on “Fox News Sunday” that it was “very difficult to imagine a circumstance in which I could support (Hagel’s) confirmation.”

“It’s interesting, the president seems bound and determined to proceed down this path despite the fact that Hagel’s record is very, very troubling on the nation of Israel,” Cruz said. “He has not been a friend to Israel. And in my view the United States should stand unshakably with Israel.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, was softer in his tone toward Hagel, saying the former senator from Nebraska would receive a “thorough vetting” just like any other presidential nominee.

Robert Reich: “Wonder why the President is willing to spend his precious political capital getting Chuck Hagel confirmed as Defense Secretary.”

Because ever since he won reelection, he’s eager to pick fights to prove he can win them? Peggy Noonan summarized it this weekend:

I doubt now he has any intention of working with them on big reforms, of battling out a compromise at a conference table, of having long walks and long talks and making offers that are serious, that won’t be changed overnight to something else. The president intends to consistently beat his opponents and leave them looking bad, or, failing that, to lose to them sometimes and then make them look bad. That’s how he does politics.

Why?

Here’s my conjecture: In part it’s because he seems to like the tension. He likes cliffs, which is why it’s always a cliff with him and never a deal. He likes the high-stakes, tottering air of crisis. Maybe it makes him feel his mastery and reminds him how cool he is, unrattled while he rattles others. He can take it. Can they?

 Lindsey Graham seems to concur with that theory:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday expressed dismay at reports President Obama would tap former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) for Secretary of Defense, calling it an “in your face” selection.

“I like Chuck Hagel. He served with distinction in Vietnam as an enlisted man — two Purple Hearts. But quite frankly Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream of thinking on most issues regarding foreign policy,” said Graham in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“He has long severed his ties with the Republican party. This is an in your face nomination of the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel,” he added. “I don’t know what his management experience is in regards to the Pentagon or global if anyway, so I think it’s an extremely controversial choice.”

Say, John Aravosis, how will gays welcome Hagel’s nomination? “Hagel’s public record on gay rights is abominable… I’m willing to believe that the man has changed in the past two years (though it seems awfully opportune). but I’d like some proof, or at the very least, a convincing explanation. We’re received neither.”

(sigh) …Here we go again.

The final Morning Jolt of the week includes a quiet backtrack, a prominent conservative columnist taking an . . . unexpected turn, and this assessment of future tax debates:

After a Frustrating Tax Concession, Much Friendlier Political Terrain in 2013

So to those of us who want the federal government to tax as little as possible and control its spending, raising taxes on individuals making more than $400,000, or households making more than $450,000 from 36 percent to 39.6 percent stinks. But that 3.6 percentage point tax hike on top earners has been the alpha and omega of Democratic tax increase arguments since, oh, the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2001.

They kept emphasizing that hiking to that rate couldn’t be economically harmful, because that was the top tax rate during the good old days of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s – as if tax rates were the only factor determining the strength of an economy.

Obama kept emphasizing how he simply wanted to “ask the rich to pay just a little bit more.” (If somebody asks you to give them 3.6 percent of your annual income, ask yourself if you would really see that amount as “a little bit more.”) Inherent in Obama’s approach is an acknowledgement that the argument, “we’re asking the rich to pay a whole lot more, gobs and gobs more in new taxes” isn’t a sure-fire applause line.

So as we head into the debate over raising the debt ceiling, Democrats find themselves without the rhetorical and policy tool that they’ve come to depend upon – almost entirely, when you think about it – for the past twelve years.

Politico:

“This does settle the issue of rates for individuals,” Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) told POLITICO. “That’s good. That certainty and predictability is one of the gains” of the fiscal cliff legislation.

Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, agreed. When asked whether more rate increases are in the offing, he responded, “I don’t foresee that.”

That Politico article goes on to quote Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee as saying, “we’ve got to make some cuts going forward, but we also need additional revenue.”

Looks like a pretty slam-dunk counter-argument for Republicans: “Why the hell are you guys talking about raising taxes on the richest Americans again? We just did that at the beginning of the year! We haven’t even reached the annual tax-filing deadline of April 16, and your calcified one-track minds are coming back with the exact same policy recommendations that you insisted would fix the problem before!”

And just think, this debate will occur as everyone in America sees their paychecks get 2 percent smaller (at least on the first $110,000 of income) because of the expiration of the temporary reduction in the payroll tax from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. (Here’s one Democratic Underground commenter exclaiming with surprise, “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with.”)

One of the fundamental reasons that “raise taxes on the rich” is less popular than Democrats want is the public’s well-founded wariness of just what income level constitutes “rich” in the eyes of lawmakers.

Obama is proudly proclaiming that he saved the middle class from a tax hike, and that he only raised taxes on the rich. But since most voters perceive their taxes in aggregate – that is, what’s left on their pay stub after everybody takes their bite – they’ll probably perceive the opposite, that an income-tax hike supposedly targeting the rich made their paychecks 2 percent smaller. Thus, they’ll be even more skeptical than usual, since they’ll think the last tax hike on “the rich” hit them instead.

(By the way, “rich” may be in the eye of the beholder, but I think you’ll find more consensus that a household income of $450,000 or single income of $400,000 annually is a fair definition of “rich” than defining it at $250,000. There are nearly five million households that earn between $200,000 and $500,000 annually.)

Megan McArdle:

Overall, I don’t see a lot of Democratic enthusiasm for further actual tax increases. I see a lot of enthusiasm for “raising taxes on the rich” as a theoretical construct which, like “American exceptionalism”, can be vigorously waved in speeches and then put back in the vault for safekeeping as soon as everyone’s seen that you’re the right sort of person who believes in good things.

The problem, of course, is that Democrats want a big government that does a lot of things. For the past few years there’s been a widening disconnect between the tax cuts that Republicans say they want, and the spending cuts they are willing to actually deliver. Having achieved the tax hikes on the rich that they campaigned on, Democrats are not in exactly the same boat–but it does look pretty similar. They want a big government with a generous welfare state, and a tax base that’s about half the necessary size.

Peter Orzag, President Obama’s former budget director said on CNBC Thursday morning that, “I think the White House in this second-best world won that round, but by not insisting that the debt limit be tied to that package it’s entirely possible they’re going to win the week and lose the quarter. You can’t know yet until you see how February and March play out, and I think there’s no doubt they have somewhat less leverage than they did in the round that just completed.”

I’m fascinated by the coverage of the expiration of the payroll tax cuts this morning; it is being treated as major failure of Congress and the president, and a bit of fiscal doom for the New Year.

Amy Davidson writes in The New Yorker:

Cuts to the already highly regressive payroll tax are being allowed to expire, meaning that they will rise from 4.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent. Obama didn’t even fight for them. In his statement Tuesday night, Obama described the bill as “preventing a middle-class tax hike” that could have hurt families and sent the country back into a recession; that is true, but it allowed another middle-class tax hike that could have the same effect. He also said that middle-class families “will not see their income taxes go up.” That is false, unless one goes along with the idea — and most of Washington does — that payroll taxes, which are on income and levied by the federal government, are not federal income taxes.

But was there ever any serious discussion of extending the payroll tax cut? As the AP notes, “it was never fully embraced by either party, and this time around, there was general agreement to let it expire.”

Maybe the expiration of the payroll tax cut really will amount to a significant economic hit in 2013:

The so-called payroll tax is scheduled to bounce back up to 6.2 percent this year from 4.2 percent in 2011 and 2012, amounting to a $1,000 tax increase for someone earning $50,000 a year.

“It’s a huge hit,” says Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors. “It hits people whether they’re making $10,000 or they’re making $2 million. It doesn’t matter who you are . . . The lower your income, the more of your income you’re (spending). So if your taxes go up, it’s going to come out of your spending.” And that is bad news for an economy that is 70 percent consumer spending.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that the higher payroll tax will reduce economic growth by 0.6 percentage points in 2013. The other possible tax increases — including higher taxes on household incomes above $450,000 a year — will slice just 0.15 percentage points off annual growth, Zandi said.It was designed to be temporary.

As a guy who prefers to pay as little in taxes as legally possible, I’m not happy to see the payroll tax go up. Heck, I wanted the entire tax suspended entirely back in 2009. But this 2 percent cut was always designed to be temporary; if anyone in Washington wanted the tax rate permanently lowered to 4.2 percent, they should have introduced legislation to do that and passed that.

Perhaps this — along with the rest of the fiscal cliff-hanger — will be a useful lesson about “temporary” tax changes. Congress usually enacts them to provide a spark to the economy, and intends to end them once the economy is in better shape. But the economy is rarely in such great health that taxes can be raised without some sort of deleterious impact; as we may experience, taxes jump back up before there’s a robust recovery and the hikes cause the economy to sputter again. (In this light, the permanency of the Bush tax cuts for those making less than $450,000 per year may be one of the most significant economic reforms in the recent era.)

Either way, as no less an Obama-friendly entity than The New Yorker has declared, President Obama has now raised taxes on all working Americans.

UPDATE: What happens when Obama returns from Hawaii and takes a victory lap for this deal, telling the American public that he saved the Middle Class tax cut, prevented millions of Americans from losing much-needed tax relief, etc., at the precise moment they’re finding their paychecks are 2 percent smaller?

The first Morning Jolt of 2013:

Welcome back! I don’t know about you, but this holiday season seemed to stretch on forever — a school vacation that kept the kids at home for eleven days, an awful cold that kept getting passed around our family, a lost cell phone, a logistical and paperwork nightmare to replace the cell phone, and a steady stream of mostly miserable weather. On the bright side, I didn’t have to deal with covering the fiscal-cliff negotiations, so God bless Bob Costa.

Depress-equestration

The fiscal cliff drama is over — for now:

After exhaustive negotiations that strained the country’s patience, the House approved a bill to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff, staving off widespread tax increases and deep spending cuts.

In the 257-167 vote late Tuesday, 172 Democrats and 85 Republicans favored the bill; 16 Democrats and 151 Republicans opposed it…

While the package provides some short-term certainty, it leaves a range of big issues unaddressed.

It doesn’t mention the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling that the United States reached Monday.

It also temporarily delays for two months the so-called sequester, a series of automatic cuts in federal spending that would have taken effect Wednesday and reduced the budgets of most agencies and programs by 8% to 10%.

This means that come late February, Congress will have to tackle both those thorny issues.

Yuval Levin: “This deal is projected to yield $620 billion in revenue over a decade — increasing projected federal revenue by about 1.7% over that time. And that’s about it. The Democrats have made the Bush tax rates permanent for 98 percent of the public, which Republicans couldn’t even do when they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.”

The righty grassroots expressed a lot of anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction in the past few weeks. Over the past week I saw a lot of comments on Twitter in the vein of, “we have a spending problem! Why won’t Republicans insist we deal with that first!”

Fume at Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all you want, but here’s the problem: The chance to gain leverage in these negotiations was on Election Day, and the GOP came up with bubkes that day. Sequestration and the expiration of all of the Bush tax cuts presented an awful status quo to begin with, and there was really no better alternative that would get A) passed in a Senate controlled by Harry Reid and B) signed by President Obama. They don’t want what we want, and we don’t want what they want. And time was on their side in several ways, not least of which was that as of noon Thursday, a new Congress, with even more Democrats, is sworn into office.

There was and is no magic argument, anecdote, policy detail or chart that could change that dynamic. What was worse — or perhaps, if you look at it a certain way, liberating — was that Republicans were and are just about certain to get the blame from most of the public, either for the failure to reach a deal or for the unpopular parts of any deal reached. Some of this is because of the power of the presidential bully pulpit, and some of this reflects people’s enthusiasm for taxing somebody making more money than they do. But a lot of this dynamic is because a large segment of the public just doesn’t pay attention to budget fights and doesn’t want to pay attention to budget fights. So no matter what the numbers actually say, they’re inclined to blame the party they already consider to be the problem.

Allahpundit examines those who wanted the House to vote down the deal passed by the Senate about an hour and a half into the New Year:

It’s worth driving a hard bargain to get something important done, even at the price of a backlash. Just remind me again what “important” goal will be achieved by forcing a new round of negotiations. What sort of spending cuts do you expect to see here? A trillion dollars over 10 years when we’re running trillion-dollar deficits annually? Even if they got Obama to agree to that, why would you believe that future Congresses would allow those cuts to happen down the line? This entire process is an elaborate charade designed to postpone the ultimate reckoning on entitlement reform, and you’re simply not going to wring serious entitlement reform out of the Democrats given the two parties’ current postures. Obama just won reelection; the Democrats expanded their numbers in the House and Senate; entitlement reform remains depressingly unpopular among the public despite attempts to educate them about the role mandatory spending plays in driving the national debt. House Republicans aren’t going to hold out for weeks on end in the futile hope of revamping Medicare against that backdrop while middle-class voters stew over their new, higher tax brackets. Why risk some of the GOP’s small reserve of political capital on a deal that’s only negligibly less terrible than this one? I understand the “let it burn” strategy, to force the public to fully absorb the cost of big government. I don’t understand this one.

The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein sees the conglomeration as a mix of some modest good and some considerable bad and ugly — but points out that perhaps nothing was uglier than how this mess came to be presented to the public as the best option:

Conservatives believe that higher taxes are a bad thing, that the tax code needs to be dramatically overhauled and that the true driver of long-term debt is out of control spending, particularly on entitlements. For those who thought it was possible to emerge from the “fiscal cliff” showdown without tax increases, with genuine tax reform and with real spending cuts that made fundamental changes to entitlements, this deal is obviously a nonstarter. For those who assumed that President Obama’s reelection and continued Democratic control of the Senate at a time when the nation was facing an automatic $4.5 trillion tax hike would inevitably mean higher taxes without actual tax or entitlement reforms, the deal is less bad.

. . . Beyond the specifics of the deal, the process was awful. Even though lawmakers knew this reality was coming for two years (on the tax side) and a year (on the sequester side), they waited until New Year’s Eve to strike a deal that passed through the Senate at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The public has had no chance to review — let alone understand — the legislation. So much for transparency.

But since you deserve to hear dissenting voices, who loathe the agreement that passed the Senate, here’s Deroy Murdock:

President Obama repeatedly has called for a “balanced approach” to deficit relief and debt reduction. H.R. 8, the bill in question, is less balanced than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Amazingly, as the Congressional Budget Office calculates, for every $1 that this proposal cuts spending, it hikes taxes by $41! In total, $15 billion in spending cuts are dwarfed by $620 billion in tax increases. Meanwhile, America’s $16.42 trillion national debt roars relentlessly on, since this measure does not even attempt to fill this Grand Canyon of red ink.

And Ben Howe: “My problem with ‘pass whatever as long as taxes don’t go up’ position is that it’s a shining example of the can-kicking that got us here.”

THE MAYAN PROPHECIES ARE TRUE! THIS IS THE LAST MORNING JOLT!!!! … Until January 2.

Actually, I did briefly think the Mayans knew something awful was going to happen this morning, when I couldn’t get my laptop to turn on. As you undoubtedly know, taking your computer to the tech guy at Staples or Best Buy or wherever is like a child going to the Principal’s office — all of a sudden, with a disapproving glare, the laptop’s behavior suddenly improves.

So in today’s slightly abbreviated edition of the Jolt:

Why Are Republicans Skeptical of Hagel? Hey, Why Are Democrats So Enthusiastic About Him?

Suddenly I get the feeling that Chuck Hagel’s expected nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense could very well end up succumbing to a left-right pincer movement of opposition.

Take a look at the latest Hagel nomination complication:

Former Sen. Chuck Hagel — a finalist for the post of Secretary of Defense in Obama’s second term — once opposed a nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg because he was “openly aggressively gay.”

“Ambassadorial posts are sensitive,” Hagel told to the Omaha World-Herald in 1998, opposing the nomination of philanthropist James Hormel. “They are representing America,” he said. “They are representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay — openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel — to do an effective job.”

Some LGBT rights groups are already criticizing the potential selection of Hagel to replaced Leon Panetta.

Delicious. Think about how much we’ve had it pounded into our heads over the past fourteen years, by our media and political elites, that the act of believing that homosexuality is immoral or some sort of flaw represents the worst of hatred and bigotry in the modern world. And now think of all of those folks having to insist that the declaration “it is an inhibiting factor to be gay — openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel — to do an effective job” is no big deal. Obama and his friends are going to have to tie themselves into pretzels over this.

Sonny Bunch: “It really is remarkable how quickly Hagel’s chorus of supporters clammed up after the ‘aggressively gay’ comments came up. I’m impressed!”

Man, imagine what Hagel would think of a gay Zionist.

But gay and lesbian Democrats might not be the only folks shifting uncomfortably in their chairs as they examine Hagel’s past record. Matt Cooper writes:

It’s Hagel’s work on the environment that may prove to be a more nagging question — one hardly likely to derail a potential nomination but interesting nonetheless.

One of the first high profile things that Hagel worked on after coming to the U.S. Senate in 1997 was going after the Kyoto climate accord. He was a congressional observer at the meeting and, along with the late coal champion Sen. Robert Byrd, authored the resolution against it.

To be fair, that measure passed 95-0 and Hagel’s objections echoed that of many members, namely that too little was being asked of mega-polluters India and China. But it portended future opposition to environmental measures. Daily Kos reminds us that former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recounts how, with Dick Cheney’s prodding, Hagel wrote a letter questioning new emissions standards put out by Christie Whitman’s EPA. Their full account is here.

All of this is relevant to the defense secretary’s job because of the huge energy impact the Pentagon has with all those ships, planes, trucks, troops, missiles, and helicopters.

So the anti-Hagel coalition is likely to include Iran outreach skeptics, defense spending fans, friends of Israel, gays and lesbians, and environmentalists. He’s a uniter, not a divider?

Alana Goodman, writing over at Contentions:

“Why make Democratic senators . . . walk the plank on this, when by finding a qualified Democrat, we can please the base?” a Jewish organization official told Mike Allen in the story above. Walking the plank is a good way to put it.

If Hagel is nominated, he will most likely get through, but it will be brutal for Democrats. Not just the confirmation process–though it will be embarrassing and damaging for Obama to have to defend some of the statements and positions Hagel’s critics will drag out. The real damage would come later–think of how the left demonized Donald Rumsfeld. Every move Hagel makes would be scrutinized and politicized. Anything controversial would be hung around the necks of the Democratic Party. For the most part, Republicans have gone easy on Obama’s defense secretaries, but that would change.

Josh Greenman, of the New York Daily News, summarizes what he calls the “Hagelian dialectic: trial balloon, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, nomination of someone else for Defense Secretary.”

From the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt:

The Anti-Bagel Hagel

Resolved: if confirmed, Chuck Hagel is going to make a lot of decisions that will irritate conservatives, Republicans, and friends of Israel.

And maybe some folks outside those groups as well. The editors of the Washington Post surprise us this morning by opposing Hagel strongly for his views on defense cuts and Iran: “Mr. Hagel’s stated positions on critical issues, ranging from defense spending to Iran, fall well to the left of those pursued by Mr. Obama during his first term — and place him near the fringe of the Senate that would be asked to confirm him… Mr. Hagel was similarly isolated in his views about Iran during his time in the Senate. He repeatedly voted against sanctions, opposing even those aimed at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which at the time was orchestrating devastating bomb attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. Mr. Hagel argued that direct negotiations, rather than sanctions, were the best means to alter Iran’s behavior. The Obama administration offered diplomacy but has turned to tough sanctions as the only way to compel Iran to negotiate seriously.”

Bret Stephens kicked off the debate over Hagel in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday:

Prejudice—like cooking, wine-tasting and other consummations—has an olfactory element. When Chuck Hagel, the former GOP senator from Nebraska who is now a front-runner to be the next secretary of Defense, carries on about how “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” the odor is especially ripe.

Ripe because a “Jewish lobby,” as far as I’m aware, doesn’t exist. No lesser authorities on the subject than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby,” have insisted the term Jewish lobby is “inaccurate and misleading, both because the [Israel] lobby includes non-Jews like Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard-line policies favored by its most powerful elements.”

Ripe because, whatever other political pressures Mr. Hagel might have had to endure during his years representing the Cornhusker state, winning over the state’s Jewish voters—there are an estimated 6,100 Jewish Nebraskans in a state of 1.8 million people—was probably not a major political concern for Mr. Hagel compared to, say, the ethanol lobby.

Alana Goodman: “Obama wouldn’t just be burning his pro-Israel voters by nominating Hagel. The reputations of pro-Israel Democratic leaders–who took to the op-ed pages to reassure Jewish voters that, despite evidence to the contrary, Obama would get serious on Iran in a second term–are also riding on this.”

Why do I get the feeling that Obama would not lose much sleep about burning the reputations of pro-Israel Democratic leaders who reassured Jewish voters? Hey, guys look out for that bus!

Jen Rubin sends along word from Abe Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, on the potential for Chuck Hagel to be picked as secretary of Defense: “Chuck Hagel would not be the first, second, or third choice for the American Jewish community’s friends of Israel.  His record relating to Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship is, at best, disturbing, and at worst, very troubling.   The sentiments he’s expressed about the Jewish lobby border on anti-Semitism in the genre of professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and former president Jimmy Carter.”

For some readers, Hagel’s invocation of the sinister-sounding “Jewish lobby” will be enough to urge Senate Republicans to strongly oppose his confirmation; for others, it will be his longtime interest in reaching out to unsavory characters in Hamas and the regime of Iran.

Still, there’s this nagging point – none of this is anything new, and neither a critical mass of American Jews or the electorate as a whole seem to care. The Obama administration’s persistent desire to hold talks with Iran were mentioned, time and again, in the campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Mitt Romney pointed out the spinning of Iran’s centrifuges over the past four years again and again on the campaign trail. Hagel’s been so pro-Obama, he was mentioned as a possible running mate in 2008, and has been mentioned for the Secretary of Defense job every time it was opened up under Obama. The unlikelihood that negotiations would advance any U.S. interest, and instead amount to a propaganda win for regimes and groups hostile to us, is pretty clear. And yet America elected and reelected the guy proposing it. And he carried the Jewish vote by a healthy majority both times.

How many times are we required to save the American people from the consequences of their actions, dragging them kicking and screaming from a bad outcome they keep trying to run towards? If only a small portion of the American Jewish community is willing to loudly oppose Hagel over his “Jewish lobby” comments, how vehemently should those of us outside that community fight a battle that we are quite likely to lose?

Also among those who also got the ball rolling on this: Jeff Dunetz.

This morning’s Washington Post/ABC News poll is chock full of the usual bad news for Republicans – they’re perceived as stubborn and uncompromising, they’ll get the blame if the country goes over the fiscal cliff, the public thinks the deficit can be dealt with without any spending cuts, and so on — but with this interesting caveat: “Nonetheless, barely more than a third of all Americans see Obama as having a broad-based mandate coming out of the November election. Among political independents, which as a group narrowly sided with Republican Mitt Romney over Obama in November, twice as many say the president should compromise with the GOP than say he has a general mandate.”

Susan Rice’s decision to withdraw from consideration as secretary of state is the best news for Republicans since Election Day.

First, a quick reminder of why the Rice nomination mattered to Republicans: Opposition to Rice would have been garden-variety if not for Benghazi, which strikes many Republicans (and too few Americans as a whole) as a major scandal and a series of egregious, deadly misjudgments. Three major questions remain: why the requests for additional security were rejected in the weeks before the attack; precisely what actions were taken that night to rescue our staff in Benghazi; and why the explanations in the first days after the attack were erroneous.

The defense from Rice — I was only saying what I had been told by the intelligence community — doesn’t fly because the “error” aligned all too perfectly with the Obama campaign’s need at that moment: to dissuade the public from the notion that we had witnessed a major terror attack on September 11, and to assert that it was all the fault of some filmmaker who is now imprisoned by U.S. authorities on a probation violation.

Rice may have only been a minor player in the effort to insist that the events in Benghazi were not terrorism, but her role was sufficient to make any promotion to secretary of state an outrage. Her confirmation would be a brazen declaration that a U.S. official can lie to the public about life-and-death issues without consequence.

Now, indisputably, Benghazi has had a consequence for the administration. Not the consequence many on the right wanted, but at least the post-attack spin derailed the career ambitions of at least one participant.

An unexpected side effect of this decision is how much this turn of events is infuriating Obama’s allies. Both last night and today on Morning Joe, NBC News Andrea Mitchell reported, “A lot of Democrats are saying that the president did not show enough loyalty. A lot of women in the administration are very angry tonight, and I’m saying this at a very high level. Angry because they feel that she was not treated with respect, she was not given the support she needed and she was left to twist in the wind.”

Ruth Marcus, this morning (I’m quoting the print version; the online version is slightly different):

But, really, Mr. President, either nominate her or pick someone else — like, two weeks ago. Don’t leave her out there, fending for herself.

Thursday’s humiliating denouement fooled no one who has been around Washington for more than a minute and a half. If the president wanted Rice, her withdrawal never would have been accepted.

It never should have been allowed to come to this. On that score, Mr. President, I’ve got a problem with you.

Obama’s allies made two assumptions in recent weeks: First, that his victory in November would mean he would get what he wants in most ways in the coming years; second, that what they want is what he wants. Both of those assumptions were always destined to be disproven, but for liberals and fans of Rice, it’s like awakening to a bucket of cold water to see them disproven so soon.

There’s an argument that Republicans should be careful what they wish for, contending that Rice had a more hawkish outlook on foreign policy than John Kerry did. But the philosophical distance between the two figures is not that decisive, and in the end, the foreign policy will ultimately reflect the decision-making of President Obama — and he’ll make a lot of decisions Republicans will oppose and some they will support. (Of course, this discussion presumes there is still such a thing as a Republican foreign-policy consensus.)

From the final Morning Jolt of the week:

For Time’s Newsmaker of the Year, You Can’t Pick This ‘Un’

Time informs us:

Kim Jong Un is having a good year. After taking over the leadership of North Korea from his late father Kim Jong Il, at the end of 2011, he’s solidified his control over the country, appeared on TIME’s cover and he was even named ‘Sexiest Man Alive.’  (OK, that honor was actually bestowed as a spoof in the satirical newspaper, The Onion, but a Chinese news service mistook the Onion piece for real news and the story went global.)

Now, he’s gotten the most votes in TIME’s completely unscientific reader Person of the Year Poll with 5.6 million votes. Not bad for a man who didn’t make an official public appearance until 2010.

This doesn’t mean Kim is TIME’s Person of the Year. That choice is made by the editors of TIME and will be revealed Dec. 19 on the Today show.

The Time “Person of the Year” is something of an obsession of mine; it’s supposedly one of our most interesting and useful markers of which figure most shaped the news.

It’s been a who’s who of the 20th Century, for good and for ill — Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Stalin, Eisenhower, Truman, Queen Elizabeth, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa . . .

But in a serious dilution of the Time magazine brand and the prestige and prominence of the title, recent years have seen a trend of odd picks. As I wrote a few years back, this is perhaps driven by a desire for newsstand sales, perhaps driven by political correctness, perhaps by a reluctance to acknowledge picks that are perceived as conservative.

I went through recent picks and suggested more plausible options by the magazine’s original criteria (most influence on the news, for good or for ill):

Time’s picks:

2001: Rudy Giuliani

2002: The Whistleblowers (WorldCom, FBI, Enron)

2003: The American Soldier

2004: George W. Bush

2005: The Good Samaritans (Bono, Bill & Melinda Gates)

2006: You

2007: Vladimir Putin

2008: Barack Obama

2009: Ben Bernanke

2010: Mark Zuckerberg

For contrast, here are my suggestions for which figure or figures had the most influence each year:

2001: Osama bin Laden

2002: Dick Cheney (it was in the post-9/11 era his influence was clearest)

2003: Saddam Hussein (from rule to war to capture, his story was the story of the year)

2004: George W. Bush

2005: Danish Cartoonists

2006: Nancy Pelosi (she was the face of the broad backlash against Bush)

2007: Gen. David Petraeus (for masterminding the Iraq surge)

2008: Barack Obama/Ben Bernanke

2009: Barack Obama/Neda, the Slain Iranian Protester

2010: The Tea Partier

I’m sure some will quibble here and there. But looking back, the Whistleblowers look minor in lasting influence; the American Soldier could be nominated any year; Bono and the Gateses are commendable but could be picked any year; Putin is powerful but could be picked any year; Bernanke was a year late; and “You” just looks silly.

This year it has to be Obama, right? Would anyone argue that there was a figure on the national or world stage who had as much influence over events as the president?

ABC News’s Jake Tapper offers a rather hard-hitting web video on the rumor that President Obama is considering appointing Vogue editor Anna Wintour, a major campaign contributor, to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom or France.

Tapper notes that the two positions are among the distinguished and prestigious in our government, once occupied by John Adams, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams (ambassador to the U.K.), and Thomas Jefferson and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver (ambassador to France).

Anna Wintour was reportedly the inspiration for the novel and movie The Devil Wears Prada, about a remarkably cruel and harsh fashion-magazine editor. You probably recall Wintour’s video for the Obama campaign.

Of course, presidents have appointed major donors to ambassadorships for decades now. But Obama’s “ethics agenda” from his 2008 campaign stated:

Obama will issue an executive order asking all new hires at the agencies to sign a form affirming that no political appointee offered them the job solely on the basis of political affiliation or contribution.

It also stated:

But in the Obama-Biden administration, every official will have to rise to the standard of proven excellence in the agency’s mission.

I suppose we’re expected to believe Wintour has distinguished credentials, qualifying her to represent the United States to one of its closest allies, beyond her political affiliation or contribution. And I suppose we’re also to believe that Anna Wintour has risen to the standard of proven excellence in the U.S. State Department’s mission in representing this country abroad.

Never mind Wintour being the most qualified person to be our next ambassador to the U.K. or France; she’s probably not even the most qualified Obama bundler for the job.

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Remember, there’s just ten shopping days until the Mayan apocalypse!

Does Anybody Besides Boehner Know What Boehner Is Doing?

Everybody’s got advice for House Speaker John Boehner. I suspect Marc Thiessen represents a new level of urgency and frustration within the GOP grassroots, as they see days slipping by, the fiscal cliff approaching, and few if any good options for the party:

Go on the offensive. Immediately put forward a plan to fundamentally reform the tax code. You will be able to outbid Obama and the Democrats in any tax-cut fight. And the intellectual groundwork has already been done. During the supercommittee negotiations last year, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) put forward a plan to lower rates, raise revenue and limit deductions. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has a revenue-neutral corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate to 25 percent and moves to a territorial system.

On the spending side, “soak the rich” by getting rid of the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare the wealthy receive each year and don’t need, and by means-testing government programs from unemployment benefits to farm subsidies.

On entitlements, put forward a plan to save Social Security and Medicare through structural reforms and by reducing benefits for well-off retirees and eliminating them entirely for the wealthiest seniors. Propose a “Buffett Rule” of your own: Warren Buffett does not need taxpayers to subsidize his retirement and health care.

On his radio program Monday, Sean Hannity was grinding his teeth over this aspect, arguing that it amounted to theft of wealthy people who had spent their lives paying into entitlement programs.

I suppose you could see it that way, but perhaps it’s good to go back and figure out the purpose of these programs in the first place. Why do we have Social Security? To provide income for retirees who can’t take care of themselves. Why do we have Medicare? To provide health care for retirees who can’t take care of themselves. Once you have a sufficiently high net worth, you can take care of yourself. So why shouldn’t Social Security benefits be eliminated for the wealthiest retirees? The left has always resisted this, fearing that if some citizens didn’t collect their benefits, they might not see it as a universal system and the public might be more amenable to additional reforms of the system.

Why yes, they would, wouldn’t they?

Anyway, back to Theissen:

STEP THREE: Pass your plans. If the president refuses to negotiate and no progress is made by February, inform him that you will attach all or part of your plan to legislation raising the debt limit and pass it in the House. Then do so. Obama will sign it. Here is why:

Unlike with the fiscal cliff, Republicans have all the leverage when it comes to the debt limit. Today, Obama is perfectly willing to go over the fiscal cliff and blame the GOP for the resulting tax increases on the middle class. But when it comes to the debt limit, he does not have that luxury. He can’t default on our debt — the consequences are too catastrophic. So in the end he will cave.

Raise your hand if you think you’ve spotted a flaw in the strategy here. Wow, lots of hands. Yes, you in the back.

“President Obama doesn’t fear catastrophic consequences, he embraces them! Because economic instability increases the general public’s dependency upon government, in a variation of the Cloward-Piven strategy to shift America to a more socialist system of economics!”

Yup, something like that. I don’t know just how committed Obama is to policies that undermine America’s economic health, but we know he doesn’t blink upon running up more than $5 trillion in debt in less than four years, $3.4 billion to $4 billion per day. We know he loves, loves, loves blaming Republicans for everything. We know he will blame Republicans for failure to pass immigration reform, bad jobs numbers, the deficit, the continuing housing crisis, gridlock in Washington, the debt panel’s failure to reach a deal, the difficulty of life for the unemployed, and the inability to build the Keystone Pipeline.

Now at some point, the public may get really tired of his “it’s never my fault” routine, and Obama might find himself in deep doo-doo. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

So if the House Republicans dig in their heels on a debt-ceiling fight, all the way up to the deadline, Obama might be okay with default and the ability to use them as a scapegoat for the remainder of his presidency, or embrace the various theories that there need not be a congressionally controlled debt limit at all:

If Obama should fail to secure a long-term solution to the debt ceiling in the context of the current fiscal-cliff negotiations, there is another way out –invoking the US Constitution.

In the wake of the Civil War, the government wanted to make clear that loans to the US government were still good (while Confederate debt would not be honored). Accordingly, the 14th Amendment includes the following provision: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned.”

In a 1935 case (Perry v. US) the Supreme Court determined that Congress does not have the authority to renege on its obligations to its lenders. The president, then, could declare as unconstitutional the current debt-ceiling law — which requires congressional approval to raise the limit — or at least use such a threat as leverage.

Maybe I’m not privy to some sort of really brilliant strategy on the part of Speaker Boehner. But right now, doesn’t it look like . . . nothing’s happening?

I thought Guy Benson had a good idea with his Hail Mary pass of having the GOP adopt Simpson-Bowles.

(Leave it to Ezra Klein to spell out all the reasons conservatives might not want to do that, such as $2.6 trillion in tax increases over ten years and $1.4 trillion in defense cuts, worse than would be enacted under sequester. Still, as far as optics and negotiation leverage goes, this would probably do the most to blow up the “stubborn uncompromising Republicans” argument.)

So Boehner offered “the Bowles plan” and . . . Obama rejected it, with no discernible consequence.

Shouldn’t House Republicans be in session, and holding votes, one after the other, on all of these options? Would that be doing more to add to the argument that they’re taking actions to avert going over the fiscal cliff, and that Obama’s the one being unreasonable and stubborn and refusing to compromise?

Here’s how the president will be spending his Monday:

Later in the morning, the President will travel to Redford, Michigan. The departure from the South Lawn and the arrival at Metro-Wayne County Airport are open press.

At Daimler Detroit Diesel, the President will tour the plant and then deliver remarks to workers. There will be out-of-town travel pool coverage of the President’s tour and the President’s remarks will be open press.

In the afternoon, the President will depart Redford, Michigan en route Washington, DC. The departure from Metro-Wayne County Airport and the arrival on the South Lawn are open press.

The campaign-style rally with auto workers is expected to help the president lock down Michigan’s 16 electoral votes in the 2012 presidential election, which he won November 6.

From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

Obama’s Presidential Oath of Office: A Private Affair

In the “you have got to be kidding me” category:

The White House Correspondents Association is strongly urging the Obama administration to allow press access to the president’s official swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20, following indications from inauguration committee officials that the event could potentially be closed to the press.

“Mindful of the historic nature of this occasion, we expect the White House will continue the long tradition of opening the President’s official swearing-in to full press access, and we as an organization are looking forward to working with the administration to make that happen,” Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, said in a statement.

Because inauguration day falls on a Sunday in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts will officially administer the official oath of office in a private ceremony that day. The public inauguration on the Capitol Building’s West Front — at which Roberts will administer a second, symbolic oath of office — will take place the next day.

In early meetings with the inaugural committee, officials privately indicated to reporters that the Jan. 20 event could be closed to reporters and cameras, with an official photograph supplied to press by White House photographer Pete Souza, sources familiar with the meeting told POLITICO.

Let me guess, they’ll invite the top donors and bundlers?

“Call me shell-shocked. I’m stunned that this is even an issue; it boggles the mind,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told POLITICO. “This is not their oath, this is the constitutional oath. It’s not for them. It’s for the public, the citizens of the United Sates. It just boggles the mind. How is this even a debate?”

Well, maybe this reflects a White House that certainly doesn’t fear bad press, doesn’t worry about it, thinks they’ve got the world on a string and that there is absolutely no tradition or unwritten rule that they need to heed. We’ve seen this type of behavior before, jumping up and down on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. Peggy Noonan back in 1998:

For seven months I have kept on my desk a picture from a tabloid. It is of two close friends of President Clinton, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and the actress Markie Post. They are laughing and holding hands in joyous union as they jump up and down at where fate has put them down. It had put them in the Lincoln bedroom. They were jumping up and down on Lincoln’s bed.

It seemed to me emblematic of the Clinton White House, a place where opponents’ FBI files were read aloud over pizza and foreign contributors with cash invited in the back door. I thought: Something’s wrong with these people, they lack thought and dignity. But most of all they seemed to lack respect, a sense of awe — not the awe that can cripple you with a false sense of your smallness but the awe that makes you bigger, that makes you reach higher as if in tribute to some unseen greatness around you.

Politico’s Dylan Byers notes, “The last time a president was inaugurated on a Sunday was in 1985. Reagan’s White House allowed complete news coverage of the private ceremony, including three reporters, three still photographers, and one network television pool camera, according to a Los Angeles Times report from the time. ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN carried live broadcasts of the event.”