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Saturday, July 09, 2011

Pelosi Seems Out of Touch Only to Those Who Are Out to Lunch

It pays to remember that at any time Congress could just vote on a "clean" bill to raise the debt ceiling like they almost always have done, and hence get the result that almost all claim must be done else the consequences will be disastrous to us all.

Republicans have attached a set of extra conditions into the discussion based on their pet agenda to destroy the safety net still more and give the rich still more, in exchange for which they claim they will be willing to do the thing they already know they must do anyway. All the drama is entirely artificial, created by their introduction into the process of a set of unprecedented and irrational and irrelevant demands.

I assume that this quality of artificiality is what is meant when people describe these negotiations as "kabuki," although it isn't clear to me that we know how this will end (which we do in actual kabuki) or even that the demands we are hearing from Republicans are the least bit theatrical (which of course they are in actual kabuki) rather than devastatingly real, reflecting either dangerous economic illiteracy or a dangerous willingness to make a wounded economy incomparably worse on the hope that such a roll of the dice might possibly yield short-term political gains.

Apparently, Nancy Pelosi raised the obvious question whether debt-ceiling negotiations might after all be decoupled again from all this actually irrelevant not to mention economically illiterate and in any case likely catastrophic deficit talk and shelved for now so that everybody can discharge their actual responsibility here to see to it that the country pays its debts and preserves its credit rating. The reaction, according to Jay Newton Small was quite instructive:
At Thursday’s White House meeting between President Obama and congressional leaders, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out in stark terms the awful economic repercussions of allowing the debt ceiling to lapse. Everyone in the room agreed that defaulting on U.S. debt would be disastrous and that something must be done. At that point, Nancy Pelosi asked: Why couldn’t the debt ceiling be decoupled from deficit reduction?

Her query, after so many weeks of reports and talks centered on deficit reduction tied to a debt ceiling deal, visibly surprised some leaders in the room, several Republican and Democratic sources say. Obama politely informed the House Minority Leader, those same sources say, that that train had left the station weeks ago.

To be fair, many Democrats would love to raise the debt ceiling with a clean vote, without conditions, but House test votes last month proved such a move to be impossible in the current climate... But some Republican and Democratic sources point to Pelosi’s question in Thursday’s meeting as one that highlights how out of touch Pelosi has become on policy as she crisscrosses the country fundraising and recruiting candidates, working to regain the majority and her speakership. The President, these same sources suggested, could rely on House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer to deliver moderate Democrats to help pass the debt ceiling, thus circumventing Pelosi.”I think it’s clear she is not taken seriously by White House, Senate and Republican leadership,” said one Democratic member on the condition of anonymity.
Just to be clear, because Pelosi appears to be almost the only person in the room in touch with any kind of actual reality, and in touch with reality precisely because she is out in the country listening to what actual citizens need and want, she is immediately castigated as being out of touch.

Also, am I the only one who is perplexed by President Obama's metaphor? After all, even trains that leave the station weeks ago usually find their way back to the station eventually. Cannot new pressures be brought to bear on recalcitrant Republicans who don't, after all, have a leg to stand on in this fight, especially given how beholden they are to corporate interests that would be among those adversely affected by a failure to raise the debt ceiling? What train is he on anyway?

Too much seems to be happening behind the scenes for me to grasp what anybody actually means or what the actual stakes are thought to be among those who are on the Democratic side in these negotiations. Everybody is flinging up trial balloons and distractions and smoke-signals and blind items left and right. We can't really know what's what until we see what's in the bill, and that's a fact. You know, it actually isn't at all implausible that Pelosi (who was very much the President's dance partner as Leader and with whom she was often subtly co-ordinating messaging in ways that played Republicans for fools) is keeping a space open to the left of Obama's official negotiating noises in all of this, while he frames the best possible deal on terms Boehner can still peddle to his coo-coo caucus. That's a lot to hope for, especially when everybody on either side is rich, and, well... the rich are not like you and me. I can't help but worry that the train is derailed, and we are all going nowhere fast.

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