Hey, what was the White House saying when President Obama signed the sequester deal?

Fact Sheet: Bipartisan Debt Deal: A Win for the Economy and Budget Discipline

The Deal Includes An Automatic Sequester to Ensure That At Least $1.2 Trillion in Deficit Reduction Is Achieved By 2013 Beyond the Discretionary Caps: The deal includes an automatic sequester on certain spending programs to ensure that—between the Committee and the trigger—we at least put in place an additional $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by 2013. 

Consistent With Past Practice, Sequester Would Be Divided Equally Between Defense and Non-Defense Programs and Exempt Social Security, Medicaid, and Low-Income Programs: Consistent with the bipartisan precedents established in the 1980s and 1990s, the sequester would be divided equally between defense and non-defense program, and it would exempt Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, programs for low-income families, and civilian and military retirement. Likewise, any cuts to Medicare would be capped and limited to the provider side.

Sequester Would Provide a Strong Incentive for Both Sides to Come to the Table:  If the fiscal committee took no action, the deal would automatically add nearly $500 billion in defense cuts on top of cuts already made, and, at the same time, it would cut critical programs like infrastructure or education.  That outcome would be unacceptable to many Republicans and Democrats alike – creating pressure for a bipartisan agreement without requiring the threat of a default with unthinkable consequences for our economy.

Now, they call those cuts “unacceptable,” but the sequester did meet President Obama’s top priorities – exempting Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, programs for low-income families, and civilian and military retirement. You only get so many top priorities. If you want to defend some areas of the budget from any cuts – you know, $85 billion out of a $3.8 trillion in a year with a projected deficit of $901 billion – you have to make some cuts in other areas. Cuts that range between 2 percent for Medicare and 10 percent for mandatory defense spending.

The sequester was a bet by the leadership of both parties in July 2011. Speaker  Boehner bet that the next time he had to deal with the sequestration cuts, he would be working with President Romney; President Obama bet that the next time he had to deal with the sequestration cuts, he would be working with Speaker Pelosi. They both lost.

So the secondhand tale of House Speaker John Boehner’s assessment that President Obama “can’t make a decision. He’s got balls made out of marshmallows” … has a certain precedent, as Exurban Jon reminds me:

“If Hillary gave him [Obama] one of her balls, they’d both have two,” Democratic strategist James Carville told the Christian Science Monitor at a breakfast on Thursday morning.

The editorial board of the Washington Post uses nicer language, but reaches the same conclusion:

… why is Mr. Obama not leading the way to a solution? From the start, and increasingly in his second term, Mr. Obama has presented entitlement reform as something he would do grudgingly, as a favor to the opposition, when he should be explaining to the American people — and to his party — why it is an urgent national need. Obama priorities such as health and energy research, preschool education and job training: Those come from the discretionary budget.

Why? Because it would mean telling his party and his supporters things they don’t want to hear. And he doesn’t have the, er… stomach for it.

The last Morning Jolt of the week (no Friday edition this week) features a potential lifetime ban for a prominent Democrat, why the perception of a Establishment vs. Grassroots fight gets so much media attention, and then the key question of how to think about the sequestration in the coming days:

Is the GOP Botching the Sequester?

Our old friend Byron York makes some good points here, but I don’t think the GOP’s argument is quite as garbled as he suggests.

In a& Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner describes the upcoming sequester as a policy “that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more.”

Which leads to the question: Why would Republicans support a measure that threatens national security and thousands of jobs? Boehner and the GOP are determined to allow the $1.2 trillion sequester go into effect unless President Obama and Democrats agree to replacement cuts, of an equal amount, that target entitlement spending. If that doesn’t happen — and it seems entirely unlikely — the sequester goes into effect, with the GOP’s blessing.

In addition, Boehner calls the cuts “deep,” when most conservatives emphasize that for the next year they amount to about $85 billion out of a $3,600 billion budget. Which leads to another question: Why would Boehner adopt the Democratic description of the cuts as “deep” when they would touch such a relatively small part of federal spending?

The effect of Boehner’s argument is to make Obama seem reasonable in comparison. After all, the president certainly agrees with Boehner that the sequester cuts threaten national security and jobs. The difference is that Obama wants to avoid them. At the same time, Boehner is contributing to Republican confusion on the question of whether the cuts are in fact “deep” or whether they are relatively minor.

Here’s the 3-by-5-index-card version of what the GOP’s message on sequestration ought to be:

• Our current level of spending is unsustainable. Spending must go down. Period.
• This is a 2 percent cut.
• Sure, if we in the Republican Party had complete control of the government, we would be implementing the cuts differently. But we don’t.
• Congress can only appropriate funds; it doesn’t run the departments and agencies that spend the money. That’s the power and responsibility of the executive branch.
• If the Obama administration’s response to a 2 percent cut is really to let all the criminals out of the jails and end food-safety inspections, then it is no longer disputable that he’s a Stuttering Cluster-you-know-what of a Miserable Failure.

I’m not exaggerating on Obama’s doomsday talk:

President Obama on Tuesday painted a dire picture of federal government operations across the United States should automatic budget cuts hit on March 1: F.B.I. agents furloughed, criminals released, flights delayed, teachers and police officers laid off and parents frantic to find a place for children locked out of day care centers.

“Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go,” Mr. Obama said, flanked by law enforcement officers at the White House. “Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids.”

While the effects may ultimately be significant, many are unlikely to be felt immediately, officials said Tuesday after the president’s remarks. Rather, they will ripple gradually across the federal government as agencies come to grips in the months ahead with across-the-board cuts to all their programs.

. . . But officials conceded that day care centers are almost certainly not going to be padlocked on March 1. Border patrols will be staffed throughout that day and the days to come. Federal agents will continue to conduct investigations, and criminals will not immediately be “let go,” as Mr. Obama suggested.

This is the Washington Monument strategy:

Named after a tactic used by the National Park Service to threaten closure of the popular Washington Monument when lawmakers proposed serious cuts in spending on parks.

Roll Call calls it “an old legislative ploy where an agency threatens to close popular services first.”

The strategy is used at all levels of government in an attempt to get the public to rally around government services they take pride in or find useful. Closing libraries on certain days of the week or reducing days of trash pick up appears to have the same effect.

Will some of these cuts stink? Yes. I dread 800,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense working four days a week.

The GOP message is, and should continue to be, “Hate these cuts? Then let’s take on the biggest issue, entitlement spending.”

As Yuval Levin recently spotlighted, one tweak to the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security effectively saves that program for the foreseeable future:

We might pay wealthier individuals with higher Social Security benefits lower annual cost-of-living adjustments than those receiving lower benefits. A progressive COLA could reduce high-end benefits by reasonable amounts in the near term while generating incentives — not disincentives — to work or save. A policy in which the highest third of beneficiaries received no COLA, the lowest third received a full COLA, and the middle third received half the current COLA would reduce Social Security outlays by around 12 percent over the first ten years. In fact, the savings from this measure alone would be enough to balance the program’s finances over the long term.

After a tough three-day weekend of golfing with the boys away from Michelle and the girls, President Obama returns to work today with a press statement standing beside “a group of emergency responders who might have to absorb some of the sequestration cuts.”

Of course, as Bob Woodward reported, Obama is denouncing his own idea: “First, it was the White House. It was Obama and Jack Lew and Rob Nabors who went to the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and said, ‘this is the solution.’ But everyone has their fingerprints on this.”

Sequestration was put together as part of the budget deal in 2011. The administration had more than a year to work out an alternative; you’ll recall that the day after the 2012 election, House Speaker John Boehner declared, “we’re willing to accept new revenue, under the right conditions.”

On February 5, President Obama urged Congress to “pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms that would delay the economically damaging effects of the sequester for a few more months,” roughly three weeks before the deadline.

There’s a similar dynamic to all of the fights between Obama and Republican leaders in Congress. He claims to be adamantly opposed to the status quo, but his actions suggest otherwise. He wants a long-term budget deal, but won’t pressure the Senate to pass its own budget and only offers broad guidelines. He says he wants to ensure the long-term viability of entitlements, but won’t propose any bold reforms of his own.

He did propose – well, leak – his own immigration reform plan, but that appears more likely to blow up the delicate balance of support for the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” bill. After all, he’s basically telling Democrats that if they don’t like the Rubio-Schumer deal, they can hold out and push the president’s.

His rallying cry on guns is that the proposals… “deserve a vote”, not that they must pass.

What has Obama spent much of the past years campaigning against? The horror of budget cuts, the heartless cruelty of entitlement reform, the failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform, and the callousness of the “gun lobby.” Getting a bill passed in any of these areas would take away his ability to campaign on these issues as he aims to help Congressional Democrats in the 2014 midterms.

From the final Morning Jolt of the week:

Fili-Bluster

Well, this is nice; Common Cause is irked at Harry Reid for not destroying the Republicans’ ability to filibuster legislation. And if they’re complaining, it probably means Republicans got a good deal:

Today’s announced “compromise” on Senate filibuster reform is in fact a capitulation by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who now has missed two excellent opportunities to restore the Senate to its proper role as a working legislative body, Common Cause said.

“My friend Harry Reid, the senator from Searchlight, NV, has gone missing in the fight for filibuster reform,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “The deal he and Sen. McConnell have struck allows individual senators to continue blocking debate and action by the entire body and to do so without explaining themselves to their colleagues or the American people. This is not the Senate of debate and deliberation our founders envisioned.”

The Huffington Post’s coverage makes it clear: Liberals believe Harry Reid sold them out:

Progressive senators working to dramatically alter Senate rules were defeated on Thursday, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), set to announce a series of compromise reforms on the Senate floor that fall far short of the demands. The language of the deal was obtained by HuffPost and can be read here and here.

Ed Morrissey summarized the impact at Hot Air:

If I had to guess, I’d say that the prospect of living under any other rules in the minority after 2014 prompted some moderate Democrats to slow down the “reform” train, as well as the prospect of setting a 51-vote precedent for rules changes and placing it in Republican hands in 2015. Instead of dictating an end to the filibuster, Reid ended up settling for a compromise that refines it, but essentially leaves it in the hands of the minority.

It looks as though McConnell got his wish in reforming the amendment process, too. The first section gives the right to the minority to offer amendments in rotation with the majority, which means Reid can no longer “fill the tree” by introducing enough amendments to shut out Republicans, although the schedule becomes constricted significantly if cloture is invoked for both the majority and minority.

This is a smart play for both Democrats and Republicans in trying to repair the reputation of the upper chamber. Reid, however, will come out looking like the big loser not so much for what he gave up, but for what he promised and then failed to deliver.

This may end up being a very big deal, as it appears that Speaker Boehner is trying a smarter strategy, trying to make Harry Reid the face of the opposition rather than President Obama and his bully pulpit.

The House GOP’s maneuver on the debt ceiling? We’ll give a three-month extension, in exchange for the Senate finally passing a budget — and in the process, putting every Democrat on record on just how much in tax increases would be necessary to pay for the spending they envision. You can picture the ads now: “As the national debt passed $16 trillion, Senator So-and-so voted to increase spending by another $1 trillion a year . . .” Translation, the Senate goes first, steps into the muck of unpopular budget decisions, and then then the House will act.

(For those screaming “but spending has to originate in the House!” keep in mind that this is not an appropriations bill but an authorization bill/plan; it doesn’t actually transfer money but instead just lays out a detailed proposal of the government’s financial goals and priorities.)

It’s the same deal on the president’s gun-control proposals: “If the Senate passes a bill, we will also take a look at that.” Translation, if NRA-friendly Harry Reid has something that he wants to make Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Max Baucus of Montana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia (not running for reelection) and Joe Manchin of West Virginia vote on . . . that’s fine.

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.”

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?

Permit me a stray radical thought or two . . .

House Speaker John Boehner says there’s been “no progress” in the budget talks in the past two weeks.

At this moment, Republicans in Congress need to examine which presents a more dire threat to the country:

A) A double-dip recession driven by the sequester and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, or

B) the public’s belief (verified through polling) that our giant debt, our ticking time bomb of entitlements, and our gargantuan government can be solved by “asking the richest Americans to pay a little bit more,” as Obama insists.

Option A is terrible, but Option B is the giant locked door blocking all of the real solutions.

So if we must have tax hikes, let the tax cuts for every income level expire and let everyone of every income level pay higher taxes. Destroy the illusion among so many voters that they can get all the government they want without paying more in taxes.

We hear the sequestration deal described as terrible, but it passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Obama. Everyone knew there was a possibility it would go into effect.

Mitt Romney and Republicans spent much of 2012 talking about how badly sequestration would endanger our national security by cutting defense spending. The American people voted for the man who signed it into law anyway. It is time we all saw the consequences of that.

House Republicans can and should say, “Almost all of us gave our word on opposing tax increases. Breaking that promise struck some of us as flatly unacceptable; others found it unthinkable without some sort of major policy concession from the president and his congressional allies. Not only were we expected to break our word, we were expected to so so in exchange for only the most modest of policy concessions. At no point did the president offer a deal worth it to our caucus.”

Will some portion of the public, probably a majority, blame House Republicans if there is no deal? Sure. But reaching a deal under Obama’s current terms would intensely alienate the base with little or no offsetting gain among those who currently blame (and hate) the Republicans. Many will argue that failing to reach a deal would spell doom for Republicans in the 2014 midterms, but we don’t know what the political environment will be like in November 2014. And exactly how long will the public stick with Obama’s unflinching demand for tax hikes for the rich as the effects of sequestration drag on?

Obama’s negotiating stance and tactics suggest he’s extremely convinced that going over the cliff, with the attendant double-dip recession, is a scenario where he wins politically. Maybe it’s worth seeing if that confidence is well-placed.

Look, whether roughly 51 percent of voters realize it or not, in November they effectively voted for another recession. Might as well get it over with.

It is not often that Cenk Uygur, formerly of MSNBC, and I concur in our assessments, but he’s now no longer a believer in the theory among some liberals that Obama is quietly playing the long game and is thinking two steps ahead of their opponents: “There is no secret, brilliant strategy. This White House is in a bubble. They think they’re winning when the roof is about to cave in.”

Uygur believes that Obama’s mistake was agreeing to move the speech; I’d argue that the defeat really began with the speech-timing brinksmanship itself.

Suppose Obama had successfully forced the Republicans to reschedule their debate to another date or time. Then what?

Sure, Obama would have had the spotlight all to himself on Wednesday, September 6. But it’s not like the GOP debate wouldn’t have gotten its share of attention on the new date, and the value of the speech spotlight depends entirely on whether Obama persuades the country that he really has a worthwhile agenda that could bring unemployment down from 9.1 percent, some grab-bag of innovative proposals that will succeed in ways that the stimulus didn’t, in the way that Obama’s housing policies haven’t, etc.

We’ll see what Obama offers on Thursday night, but many of us feel like we’ve heard it all before: “I inherited this,” “prevented another Great Depression,” “saved or created,” “green jobs,” “repair our crumbling roads and bridges,” “winning the future,” “we can’t afford not to invest in” blah, blah, blah. Never mind that just weeks ago, Obama was promising a “very specific plan.”

It appears that the Obama team more or less believes that they have no chance of passing a jobs plan through a GOP House, anyway. From Mike Allen’s morning newsletter:

TIME’s MICHAEL SCHERER, in the forthcoming issue — ‘Can He Step Up His Game? Obama’s next move: if he can’t fix the economy, make sure the Republicans get the blame’: ‘In June, . . . White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair . . . Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century — Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 — won re-­election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. . . . The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory. They intend to make sure voters believe a year from now that their fortunes are improving, and they plan to persuade the American people that a Republican in the White House would be a step backward. . . . Obama will try to divert the public’s frustration with Washington toward his main enemy, the GOP.’

Yet the next item indicates the problem with this spin; Obama’s team is arguing that opposition from Republicans is preventing passage of ideas that are supported by both Republicans and Democrats. What?

JAY CARNEY, on “Morning Joe,” re President Obama’s jobs address to joint session of Congress next Thursday: “He will make the case to the American people . . . that politics is broken, and that politics is getting in the way of the very necessary things we need to do. Now he hopes . . . that members of Congress will come back from their recess with a new sense of urgency . . . There’s nothing that’s preventing us from doing these things — both to grow the economy and to create jobs, AND to get our fiscal house in order — except politics. In both cases, as you will see next week, there are broadly supported, bipartisan options here that would SOLVE THE PROBLEM.”

Really? There’s no collection of ideas that Obama and House Republicans could agree on to stimulate job creation? No trade deals? No regulations that could be eliminated? No tax-code reforms?

From the Thursday edition of Morning Jolt:

The Next CBO Report Will Be an Incoherent Collection of Shrieks and Giggles

Okay, not really. Just budgetary and financial doom, continuing apace: “The United States is facing profound budgetary and economic challenges. At 8.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the $1.3 trillion budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects for 2011 will be the third-largest shortfall in the past 65 years (exceeded only by the deficits of the preceding two years). This year’s deficit stems in part from the long shadow cast on the U.S. economy by the financial crisis and the recent recession. Although economic output began to expand again two years ago, the pace of the recovery has been slow, and the economy remains in a severe slump. Recent turmoil in financial markets in the United States and overseas threatens to prolong the slump. The unemployment rate is projected to fall from 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and to 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012—and then to remain above 8 percent until 2014.”

Footnote: With 8.5 percent unemployment, President Obama does not get reelected. Okay, it’s theoretically possible that the GOP louses things up or Obama runs some sort of fantastic campaign persuading Americans that good times are just around the corner, but . . . in the end, he’s presided over what feels like a four-year recession. As Private Hudson so succinctly summarized, “game over, man, game over.”

In fact, Joseph Lawler observes at the American Spectator, “By the CBO’s projections, the employment situation would be a huge drag for him if he were running in 2016, never mind 2012.”

But J. D. Foster at the Heritage Foundation argues that the whole gloomy picture is, actually, way too cheery: “Yet even this forecast for 2011 seems extremely optimistic given that the current official estimates for annualized growth in the first and second quarters of this year were a negligible 0.4 and 1.3 percent, respectively. To achieve the projected level of growth for the year, either the Bureau of Economic Analysis will need to revise these slow earlier growth rates upwards significantly or the economy will need to grow at an annualized rate of nearly 3.8 percent in the latter half of the year.

“While such an acceleration in growth would be most welcome, it is hard to envision given the recent apparent slowdown in the U.S. economy, stock market jitters, and a slowing of the European economies and a slow-motion sovereign debt meltdown.”

At NRO, Andrew Stiles reports, “All told, the CBO report is bad news for an already struggling economy, and perhaps worse news for the flailing Obama presidency. Not surprisingly, Republicans were quick to pounce on the report. ‘A slight decrease in the projected deficit is nothing to celebrate, particularly when it is accompanied by the grim news that CBO expects the national unemployment rate to continue to exceed 8 percent well past next year,’ House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said in a statement. ‘The president’s policies were supposed to keep that from happening. Instead they’ve added trillions to our debt at the expense of our children and helped put our nation’s credit rating in jeopardy. Where are the jobs?’”

Over in Mike Allen’s political newsletter:

STATE OF PLAY, from a top Dem.: ’The press will obsess about [today's House] vote [on the Boehner Two-Step], but at best it is an exercise in political machismo, at worst it is the beginning of the most irresponsible act in Congressional history. The House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate — at least 58 senators are on record saying they won’t support it. That’s worse than Ryan and cut, cap and balance. Once the vote is over, Speaker Boehner needs to begin immediately working on a way out of the mess Cantor created. If he doesn’t, we could be in big trouble. There are dozens of possible compromises — he just has to take one. Reid, McConnell and the White House have plenty of options. The question is: Will he choose compromise for the sake of the country, or political grandstanding for the sake of his caucus?’

Boehner’s plan cuts less that the two preceding proposals, yet it’s deemed “worse than Ryan and cut, cap and balance” by Senate Democrats. The more Boehner concedes in smaller cuts, the more intransigent the Democrats get. There is no pleasing these people.

Fine, Senate Democrats. Let’s vote on the Obama plan. You do have copies, right?

In the midweek Morning Jolt, a look at the White House’s reluctance to write down its budget plan, a suggestion that Obama’s base is crumbling, and, of course, the Byzantine debt negotiations and strategies.

We Need Some of Harry Potter’s Debt Eaters… Oh, What? They’re Not Called That?

Somehow the debt ceiling has turned me into Socrates; the more I learn, the less I know. I’ve heard from smart, qualified minds in the financial world argue, forcefully and seemingly informed, that the net effect to the economy will be much, much less than the doomsday talk suggests.

(Forget tying a game; awesome off-the-record discussions are like kissing your sister.)

I’ve also heard the quite compelling argument that because the real issue for America’s credit rating is not the debt ceiling but the size of the debt itself, that it’s effectively already too late, and that we will lose our AAA credit rating sometime in the near future even if we do enact the Boehner plan or the Reid plan. (I don’t say the Obama plan even though Jay Carney insists it’s the most brilliant plan ever never committed to paper.) In this line of thinking, it is argued the best move for Congressional Republicans is to lose the fight and let Obama and the Democrats pass a version as close to their ideal as possible, to demonstrate that their approach can only hurt the country’s credit rating and let Obama reap the whirlwind in 2012.

A bit of evidence for this argument: “Only seven days stand between the U.S. and the effects of a credit default. But a downgrade of the nation’s stellar AAA credit rating seems a lot more likely, and a lot sooner. The White House had been alerted repeatedly over the past month by rating agencies that without a strong, long-term plan to restructure the country’s debt, they would lower America’s credit rating as soon as this Friday, according to two officials familiar with the process. The White House was warned that the deal would have to be significant—and not a short-term fix over the next few days to avoid a credit drop.”

Then again, I’ve also heard a strong argument that even if Obama “wins” this showdown, it will be moot in six months – Americans will know that their government is still spending and borrowing with reckless abandon, and they’ll know that their own households and small businesses and institutions have to demonstrate credit-worthiness before getting a loan. (I’m told that credit for small businesses has simply not recovered from 2008, and no one expects it to anytime soon.) Congress is the only institution that when it maxes out its credit cards can just create more credit by voting itself a hike in the limit, an act that, at some point, can only run into the laws of supply and demand. At some point, fewer institutions and people will want to lend the federal government money, and then the reckoning hits.

At Hot Air, Allahpundit assembles the scorecard for the Boehner plan, which looks like “PRO” and “CON” were assembled by selecting prominent righty lawmakers, institutions and columnists randomly from a hat: “In addition to [Paul] Ryan and Allen West, Cantor’s supporting the bill on grounds that it’s time to stop whining and take what the party can get. Haley Barbour agrees, as apparently does the Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, Fred Thompson, Yuval Levin, and James Pethokoukis argue that Boehner’s plan isn’t half bad under these awfully unfavorable circumstances… Opposed to the bill are influential House conservatives like Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert and influential Senate conservatives like DeMint and, er … Lindsey Graham. The Club for Growth is also a no, which will make incumbents worried about a primary challenge think twice.”

Hey, in light of this bizarre patchwork, can we skip the traditional RINO-accusations, branding, posse-organizing and public pillorying that are now pro forma of every intra-Republican debate?

Put another way… you tell Allen West he’s a RINO squish.

Yet the editors of the Wall Street Journal are getting a bit snippy with Boehner deal opponents: “What none of these critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner’s plan. The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor. This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.”

With horrific events unfolding in Norway, the usual back-and-forth and who’s up and who’s down in American politics seems petty and small today. File this away for early next week, when we can return to our usual domestic passions:

CNN’s latest poll, of adults, puts Obama’s approval at 45 percent and his disapproval at 54 percent. Among independents, the split is 39 percent approval, 59 percent disapproval . . .

John Boehner, interestingly, has a 43 percent favorable, 32 percent unfavorable split.

A surprisingly high 46 percent of respondents say they “never heard of” House majority leader Eric Cantor.

Majorities think everybody should compromise more.

When Democrats were asked, “Do you think the Democratic party should renominate Barack Obama as the party’s candidate for president in 2012, or do you think the Democratic party should nominate a different candidate for president in 2012,” the survey found 77 percent thought Obama should be renominated; 22 percent wanted someone different. That’s a bit lower than I expected, but the number has bounced between 76 and 83 in the past year or so.

Fascinatingly, only 78 percent of Republicans think “the policies being proposed by the Republican leaders in the U.S. House and Senate will move the country in the right direction.” Another 19 percent think they’ll move the country in the wrong direction.

Of course, in the minds of the respondents, the “policies” could be the McConnell plan, could be the Gang of Six or Seven, could be Cut, Cap and Balance . . .

I know it will come as an enormous shock to you, but the Washington Post found that Americans don’t have much faith in any figure in Washington to resolve the debt-ceiling issue.

Democrats can find a bit of solace in that Obama rates the highest among the six figures, but even he’s “underwater,” with 49 percent having little or no confidence in him, and the two figures with the least amount of public confidence are Senate majority leader Harry Reid (57 percent say “not too confident” or “no confidence”) and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (61 percent).

Looking at the party breakdown, we’re left wondering, who are the 10 percent of self-identified Republicans who have faith in Pelosi here? And would anyone have expected Republicans to have more faith in Harry Reid than Barack Obama?

This . . . is an awful jobs report.

A few things to keep in mind as you peruse all the bad news below the headline that unemployment went up to 9.2 percent.

First, I wonder if Obama adviser David Plouffe still believes what he said yesterday.

“The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” Plouffe said. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’”

“Their decision next year will be based upon two things,” Plouffe said. “How do I feel about things right now and then, ultimately, campaigns are always much more about the future and who do I think has got the best idea, the best vision for where to take the country?”

Secondly, I wonder if President Obama still believes that Speaker Boehner’s “Where are the jobs?” query is a “skewed question,” as he stated earlier this week.

Thirdly, I suspect Mitt Romney will get more use out of this ad:

Fourthly, I expect we’ll hear a lot of talk about this quote from February 2009.

Obama set, perhaps inadvertently, a three-year deadline when he declared:

I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years. A year from now, people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then this is going to be a one-term proposition.

Three years from that statement would be February 2012. Obama has seven months to demonstrate a significant improvement in the economy he inherited.

I wonder if Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.) regrets saying in June 2010, “The economy has recovered.”

I wonder if Tim Geithner regrets writing an op-ed entited, “Welcome to the Recovery” in the New York Times on August 2, 2010.

I wonder if Ron Sims, deputy secretary of housing and urban development, regrets writing on the White House blog that “this summer is sure to be a Summer of Economic Recovery” in June 2010.

Finally, I wonder if Debbie Wasserman Schultz regrets saying in June, “I’m going to take ownership right now because we began to turn the economy around.”

UPDATE: Jeff Dobbs writes in, asking if Obama will have the, er, audacity to continue claiming “we’re headed in the right direction.”

Over in the Corner, James Pethokoukis reports on House Speaker John Boehner’s comments to the Economic Club of New York, and how the Wall Street crowd would generally prefer a quick vote to raise the debt ceiling, followed by tax increases to balance the budget. Boehner indicated he would oppose both moves, and that serious spending cuts were a requirement for raising the debt ceiling.

The good folks at Resurgent Republic recently conducted a survey of 1000 registered voters April 17-20, indicating that public opinion is strongly on Boehner’s side. They found:

• 89 percent of voters oppose President Obama’s call to raise the debt limit without limiting spending (ie, a “clean” debt limit).
• Only 11 percent of voters – including 18 percent of Democrats – support increasing the debt limit without preconditions.
• The preferred option, drawing support from a plurality of voters (47 percent), is “raising the debt limit, but only in exchange for substantial spending cuts and a commitment to reduce the deficit.”
• The second-ranking option (35 percent) is “not raising the debt limit under any circumstances.”
• A majority of voters (56 percent) are more likely to support a debt limit increase if changes are made to make entitlement programs financially solvent for the future.
• Nearly half of voters (49 percent) are more likely to support a debt limit increase if substantial spending cuts are included to prevent the country from having to increase the debt limit in the future.
• By greater than 2-to-1, voters believe “any increase in the federal debt limit should be tied to specific cuts in federal spending” rather than “Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling because it is the only responsible thing to do.”

The details of the survey can be found here.

Who wants to shut down the federal government?

Let us turn to the question of “cui bono” — who benefits. There seems to be a bipartisan agreement on this aspect.

Let us start with a former head of the DNC:

Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sees an upside to a looming government shutdown — at least politically.

“If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it,” said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. “I know who’s going to get blamed — we’ve been down this road before.”

Chris Matthews:

The president looks cool as a cucumber, like, ‘I can’t wait for this fight.’. . . It just seems like the president is in a happy-go-lucky mood.

Howard Fineman:

One of the things that make the president confident is that there’s videotape of the Tea Party people saying, “cut it or shut it.” In other words, if there’s a shutdown, the president’s going to be able to say that the Republican leadership was forced into this by their Tea Party constituents and they’re going to show the videotape, and the videotape is going to be, “we the Tea Party can’t wait for a shutdown.”

Michael Takiff, Bill Clinton biographer and contributor, Huffington Post:

When the Republicans refused to pass another temporary spending bill (a “continuing resolution”), the government shut down. As citizens watched B-roll footage of unsent Social Security checks and padlocked national parks, they blamed the mess on Gingrich and his band of House flamethrowers. As Clinton & Co. sought reelection the following year they tied the unpopular speaker around the neck of the GOP nominee, Bob Dole, and the president cruised to victory. Piece of cake — just as it can be now for Barack Obama.

Even House Speaker John Boehner has told his Republican colleagues that if the government shuts down, the Democrats are the most likely political beneficiaries.

So when everyone agrees that one side has every motive in the world to prevent it, and one side has every motive in the world to ensure a shutdown occurs, why should we believe that the predicted beneficiaries are really making an effort to avoid a shutdown? And why should we believe the accusations that Republicans are digging in their heels, ensuring a shutdown occurs?

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) issued the following statement on the debt limit:

I’ve been notified that the Obama Administration intends to formally request an increase in the debt limit.  The American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington.  While America cannot default on its debt, we also cannot continue to borrow recklessly, dig ourselves deeper into this hole, and mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren.  Spending cuts — and reforming a broken budget process — are top priorities for the American people and for the new majority in the House this year, and it is essential that the President and Democrats in Congress work with us in that effort.

We mock economists for using the adverb “unexpectedly” in response to almost every bit of bad news over the past two years, but today’s news that unemployment is back up to 9.8 percent seems genuinely surprising. About a half-hour after this morning’s numbers were released, one CNBC anchor closed a segment, “After the break, we’ll have your e-mails about signs of economic recovery,” then he paused and chuckled, motioning to the unseen teleprompter. “Yeah, that was written before 8:30.”

One of the economists made a compelling case that as the “discouraged workers” start looking for work again, the official size of the workforce will increase, and we’ll see the unemployment rate go above 10 percent sometime this winter.

President Obama will address the numbers this morning, but there’s little reason to expect we’ll hear much new. He’ll argue that the bad news shows that everything he wanted passed before — tax hikes on the rich, extended unemployment benefits, heck, maybe even START — now really must be passed. You’ll probably see the predictable line from the usual suspects that the bad economic news means more pressure on congressional Republicans to compromise.

Hogwash, of course. Obama and the Democrats had their turn at bat and struck out on three pitches. None of their pledges of a recovery summer (or fall, or winter, or spring) have panned out. The notion that the American people will suddenly embrace their approach on the eve of the Republicans’ formally retaking power is nonsensical.

Boehner weighed in this morning:

House Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-OH) this morning called on the lame-duck Congress to cut spending and stop all the looming tax hikes after the Department of Labor reported that unemployment rose to 9.8 percent in November despite Obama Administration projections that the ‘stimulus’ would keep unemployment below eight percent.  Joblessness has now topped 9.5 percent for 16 straight months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression.  Boehner issued the following statement:          

“Any sign of job growth in this struggling economy is encouraging, but clearly no match for the uncertainty families and small businesses are facing, which is why we must cut spending and stop all the looming tax hikes.           

“Unfortunately, Democratic leaders continue to insist on wasting time with meaningless votes as they try to make it as difficult as possible to stop their job-killing tax hike.  Families and small businesses have had enough of politicians in Washington talking about creating jobs while doing everything in their power to kill more jobs.  This is exactly the kind of Washington game-playing the American people voted against on Election Day.  The lame-duck Congress should do the right thing and vote immediately to cut spending and stop all the tax hikes.  If they don’t, the new House majority will in January.

A pair of highlights from today’s Morning Jolt . . .

So What Do We Owe the Debt Commission?

I didn’t have high hopes from this bipartisan panel that’s supposed to save us from the deficit; bipartisan commissions of former lawmakers are traditionally the last resort of lawmakers who have run out of real ideas. Only the 9/11 commission, broke with tradition and generated a report that everyone wanted to read, and it’s hard to imagine a subject more dramatic or more likely to have high levels of public interest. Since then, we’ve heard from or heard demands for more commissions on every major issue — Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and finally, the oil spill. Does anyone remember anything useful coming out of any of these? Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton generated more widely-ignored sequels than Freddy Krueger . . .

John Boehner, Coming Soon to a Flight Near You

This seems like a good idea, and a wonderful contrast with his predecessor, but it’s easy to see some complications down the road: “House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Wednesday he intends to take commercial flights home when he moves up to speaker in the new Congress. ‘Over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on commercial aircraft, and I am going to continue to do that,’ he told reporters. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, took heat in 2007 when she started flying an Air Force jet that could go nonstop back to her congressional district in California.”

There’s a brief discussion of the security concerns, but there’s probably a 99 percent chance that it will never a major issue. But you can imagine the day it is, right?

“This is terrible! A terror attack has incapacitated the President and Vice President! Where’s the Speaker of the House? We need him to take the oath so that we have a commander-in-chief to oversee and authorize the military response!”

“He’s stuck in a holding pattern over Akron, because of a weather pattern over the Appalachians, wedged in coach between a traveling salesman and that hyperactive rapper who Mitt Romney incapacitated with the Vulcan neck pinch, trying to get his seat to recline.”

Also note that I’ve heard from a Bushie I trust that the story of President Bush telling Gordon Brown he was willing to endorse Barack Obama, mentioned in yesterday’s Jolt, is untrue, denied by the former president himself. I suspect that this is an off-the-cuff joke being wildly stretched.