Naturally, not everyone saw it that way back then. Shortly after Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 which resulted from the debt ceiling deal, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote several articles critical of the president's strategy in reaching that agreement.
"Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the oppositon, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe?" Fallows wrote. "Or, was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? or pawn?"
Mixed martial arts or chess? Take your pick. Obama was either Jon "Bones" Jones or
Bobby Fischer, but whichever role he chose, it's pretty clear now that it's the
Republicans who kinda got Tonka toyed with. That seemingly out-of-whack "all cuts no
taxes" debt crisis agreement accepted by Obama in 2011 now turns out -- as some
had then surmised -- to have been a calculated bit of short term
capitulation. Just part of a shrewd, albeit
dangerously hubristic political strategy: risky because for all practical
purposes, it could only bear fruit if Obama was reelected.
Like the president, the
Republicans also made a huge gamble since the upper hand on the fiscal cliff is
held by the Party that holds the White House. It's reasonable to theorize that latent euphoria from their smashing successes
in the 2010 mid-terms and convinced that their Party-wide crusade to "deny the president
a second term" would bear fruit, provided the GOP enough assurance to expect that
by the time the fiscal cliff became an issue the GOP would control the White
House.
In hindsight it's obvious that
they were falsely assured. And as we
now have seen regarding the fiscal cliff showdown, the GOP is forced to again engage
in what has become its modus operandi for moving legislation under Obama: stage a bewildering act of political Kabuki
Theatre for a while, then gussy themselves up for the eventual Kumbaya Festival
after Obama gets his way.
Apparently they have little
choice. A recent
Bloomberg poll shows that two-thirds of Americans and 45
percent of Republicans favor raising taxes on the rich. Other
polls show that the public will blame Republicans if no agreement is
reached before the fiscal cliff deadline. But what's easier to conclude however, is that
Obama's mastery of the art (or science) of politics has forced the GOP into a period
of reflection and deep soul-searching.
Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio have taken
to sputtering half-baked
mea culpas -- on behalf of themselves and their Party -- about
compassion. Meanwhile, neo-con Bill
Kristol has inferred that conservatism has devolved from a movement to a "racket," Republican
National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced that the GOP would perform
an "autopsy" in
hopes of figuring out how it can win upcoming elections and Newt Gingrich has
flat out stated that the GOP is " incapable " of
competing against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile, Boehner has purged
Tea Partiers from their congressional committees and another
Tea Party heavyweight, Jim DeMint, once called "the biggest douche bag
in the
douche bag capital of the world," hightailed it to a similar
hangout popular among folks like him: the Heritage Foundation.
But hardly lost in the midst of
all this disarray is the significance of the fact that Republicans are now poised
-- for the first time in a generation -- to tell Norquist that the time has
come to keister that "anti-tax
pledge" of his; to say, in essence:
"It was a nice run, Grover; but revenues
are on the table."
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