Tea Party Victory Demonstrates Dems' Disarray & Obama's Impotence

First Part of Pledge: Achieved!

The WSJ editorial linked here has the subtext:

No wonder liberals are howling. They have come to believe in the upward spending ratchet, under which all spending increases are permanent. Not any more.

This, if true, means that the mid-term elections of last November have actually gone beyond the over-used "Game Change" to the cardinal view that the Tea Party small government faction has changed the actually GROUND RULES for government debate in D.C.

In Feb, 2010, the debt-ceiling ratcheted up without a murmur from the slumbering lamestream MSM and only a few bleats from hopelessly outnumbered GOP diehards. In Feb., 2011, Obama & Geithner again asked for a "seamless" re-up of the ceiling, with no strings attached. But an earthquake in November had changed the landscape and the feckless White House mafia had just been transformed into a possibly dying species almost overnight. As the WSJ editorial goes on to say:

The big picture is that the deal is a victory for the cause of smaller government, arguably the biggest since welfare reform in 1996. Most bipartisan budget deals trade tax increases that are immediate for spending cuts that turn out to be fictional. This one includes no immediate tax increases, despite President Obama's demand as recently as last Monday. The immediate spending cuts are real, if smaller than we'd prefer, and the longer-term cuts could be real if Republicans hold Congress and continue to enforce the deal's spending caps.

William McGurn says in a different article in today's WSJ:

When it comes to Murphy's Law—the idea that anything that can go wrong, will—we Irish have our corollary: Murphy was an optimist. [But] even from this sunny perspective, it's hard to look at the debt-ceiling compromise and see it as anything but a conservative victory. It's not just that Speaker of the House John Boehner succeeded in imposing some conditions in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling. It's that the deal has Democrats, including the president, essentially signing on to the Republican framework for defining the Beltway's budget problem: spending that is too high rather than taxes that are too low.

Read both articles for the ultimate mini-revolution that this debt-ceiling debate has achieved---despite the lamestream MSM's obsession with a few Tea Party diehards and some socialists like Bernie Sanders and the screeching howler monkey, Debbie Wasserman-Schlubette. But McGurn's final summary shows us that we weren't as gullible as our Irish ancestors [his & mine anyway], at least according to Irish lass MoDo of the NYT:

Maureen Dowd quotes a Democrat as saying we're watching President Obama "turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes." The headline over Paul Krugman's column declares, "The President Surrenders." Equally gloomy is the editorial: "To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal."

Over at the New Republic, Jonathan Chait asks, "Did Obama Get Rolled?" Peter Beinhart at the Daily Beast answers the question with a piece headlined "How the Tea Party Won the Deal." Most argue that the president should have stood his liberal ground.

The problem with this view is that the more people see the president, the less they seem to like what he's selling. That's particularly true for the people he will need to win re-election. A new Gallup poll shows that only one of three independents now approves of how Mr. Obama is doing his job.

As for the right wing, at least for the moment the wounds on both sides of the debt-ceiling divide remain raw. Some who see the deal as another Republican sellout will fight down to the wire. Others rightly point out that the gains here are neither guaranteed nor all that substantive.

In this, the liberals are closer to the truth. Yes, Mr. Obama got a deal that takes him past next year's election, and can play himself up as the greater compromiser. The price, however, was high. Effectively he has surrendered to the Republican framework for debate on taxes and spending.

That puts 2012 on terms much friendlier to the argument that Republicans need to make to the American people. It runs like this: If you are want a government in Washington that spends less, that taxes less, and encourages our private sector to grow, you need a Republican in the White House.

Even Murphy might find the glass half-full.

The WSJ editorial puts the so-called Tea Party Triumph into a more realistic context:

The same supposedly conservative Republicans and their talk radio minders may denounce this deal as a sellout, but we'll be charitable and assume they've climbed so far out on the political ledge they don't know how to climb back without admitting they were wrong. They're right that this deal doesn't "solve" our fiscal crisis, but no such deal is possible as long as liberals run the Senate and White House.

The debt ceiling is a political hostage the GOP could never afford to shoot, and this deal is about the best Republicans could have hoped for given that the limit had to be raised. The Jim DeMint-Michele Bachmann-Sean Hannity alternative of refusing to raise the debt limit without a balanced-budget amendment and betting that Mr. Obama would get all the blame vanishes upon contact with any thought. Sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage.

The tea partiers pride themselves on adhering to the Constitution, which was intended to make political change difficult. Yet in this deal they've forced both parties to make the biggest spending cuts in 15 years, with more cuts likely next year. The U.S. is engaged in an epic debate over the size and scope of government that will play out over several years, and the most important battle comes in the election of 2012.

Tea partiers will do more for their cause by applauding this victory and working toward the next, rather than diminishing what they've accomplished because it didn't solve every fiscal problem in one impossible swoop.

Little steps for little feet might be the byword for a minority faction in a majority of the now-ascendent Republican House, which is threatening to return to the old Sam Rayburn or even Joe Cannon days where the Speaker was effectively the co-President of the nation. Boehner is a solid son of the Middle West and not prone to the public imbecility of the previous Speaker, a California Left Coast cretinette.

Now the serious work of electing a somebody to replace the nobody in the Oval Office at the moment. Until that happens, all the rhetoric and fiscal windmill-jousting will remain more of a romantic quest than a true advance towards the US gaining its worldwide primacy in the global economy as well as the global military theater.