Last Deal Gone Down

Looks like a debt ceiling deal is in place, and John Boehner is declaring victory. All I can say is: we'll see. It is reassuring to see House progressives denouncing the deal as a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich." There must be something good in there if it can make someone that mad.

The cuts are of the fictional "slowing the rate of growth" variety, not actual cuts. But, for the first time that I am aware of, the public seems generally aware of the bogusness of the debt "crisis" and of the magic of baseline budgeting, which renders trillion dollar cuts to be evanescent. This is still a "DC" budget agreement, meaning it only really makes sense to budget wonks. (see Verum Serum's explanation for why the "baseline" will and will not prevent the Supercomittee from raising taxes).

I know there will be howls on the Right over the deal, not because they wanted to cause a default, but because there's a sense out there that cuts should be real cuts, not cuts in the rate of growth. And I can understand that. It's what's preventing this from feeling like a victory. But, you know who didn't win this fight? Barack Obama and the American Left. Ol' Golden Throat thought he could intimidate House conservatives by taking his "tax the rich" message to the American public. Well, he made his case ad nauseum, and failed spectacularly. Indeed, it was his arrogant demand for an additional $400 billion in revenue that sent John Boehner back to the Tea Party freshmen, and their allies. Maybe "we" didn't win, but the other guy sure as hell lost, and badly.

One thing that Rush Limbaugh said during the last week that I thought was effective: Republicans should stop acting like losers, and start acting like winners. By that he meant that the post-1994 Republican Congress had continued the Bob Michel mindset that came with 40 years in the House minority. They expected to lose, even though they had won a landslide election in November. At times, Rush seemed more like Mike Singletary, than the titular head of the Republican Party. But, you know, it was effective. When you saw the Democrats revving up their "Republicans are stealing X-mas" talking points for one last go, and the MSM eagerly re-typing DNC memos into front page stories, you had to think many in the GOP flinched. But, in the end, they obtained something of a back bone.

Is the deal perfect? Hell no! We've got this dumb Super-committee that is apparently going to agree on budget cuts. (Hah!) As usual, the only cuts that are imminent are cuts in defense spending, not entitlements. (not to say the Pentagon is sacrosanct. there's plenty of waste, fraud and abuse there. But at least national defense is in the Constitution). And tax increases are still very much in the mix. But, the deal gets us to 2012 with Democrats having failed to do the one thing they hoped to get out of this mess: pin the bad economy on the GOP.

All in all, it was a pretty good day at the office.

Where's The Panic Button?

Hard to believe this story in CNBC is for real. According to John Carney, the adults in the room are expressing frustration with the absence of a stampede for the exits in the markets. As they learned during the TARP voting, there's nothing like a historic drop in the Dow to change a few votes.

I just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who has spent the past few days trying to convince Republicans to vote for a debt ceiling hike.

He told me that the biggest obstacle he faces has been "market complacency."

"Frankly, a bit of panic would be very helpful right now," he said.

As he explained it, lots of people in Washington, D.C. expected that this would be a week marked by panic in the markets. Stocks would tank. Bonds would get clobbered. The dollar would do something dramatic. And all of this would help convince reluctant lawmakers that they had to reach a compromise on the debt ceiling.

Hard to imagine you can improve on the boundless cynicism of the bolded part. But, wait, there's more:

"We were following the script from 2008. When the market collapsed after TARP failed, that spooked everyone enough to get them to fall in line. We thought the same thing would happen this week," he said.

That's the problem. Everyone knows that the TARP vote was indeed induced by a DC-NY axis that threatened Armageddon if a trillion dollars wasn't transferred to every major financial institution in the world by the close of business on Thursday. Ever since then, the Congress simply hasn't been legislating in a normal manner: no budgets for 800 days, endless continuing resolutions, health care reform passed via bribes and procedural tricks, etc., all the while accompanied by apocalyptic pronouncements about a broken "system" and Republican intransigence. At this point, the market has probably priced the cost of liberal governance into its buy-sell decisions, hence the failure to panic.

The markets have been down a little this week, but that is as much due to the increasing rate of bad economic news as it does the parliamentary machinations in DC. And despite the best efforts of the adults in the room, the markets simply don't believe a default is coming because such an event would be due to a willful act of the executive branch, not because of Tea Party extremists in the Legislature.

House Omnibus

Jim Geraghty has another one of his patented omnibus analyses of the House races rated as toss-ups. There are no fewer than 117 (!) races in Geraghty's list. Feel free to click over to graze, but I will highlight the California races:

CA-11: Survey USA puts David Harmer ahead of incumbent Democrat Jerry McNerney by 6.

CA-20: The DCCC is worried enough about Republican Andy Vidak’s chances against incumbent Democrat Jim Costa to start spending money here.

CA-47: Incumbent Democrat Loretta Sanchez is tied with Republican Van Tran, or as she prefers to call her opponent, “the Vietnamese.”

CA-51: Perhaps the toughest GOP candidate of the cycle, Nick Popaditch, vs. incumbent Democrat Bob Filner in a district with high unemployment and serious housing-bubble fallout, and the polls say . . . nothing. This is one of the few interesting House districts with not a single poll released.

Only 4?! How depressing. Also, I see that Star Parker doesn't appear to be competitive enough to rate a mention, which is also too damn bad. Compton needs another round of progressivism like I need two more years of Nancy Pelosi as my congressman.

Still, the four races Geraghty highlights are worth paying attention to, inasmuch as there are so few "swing" districts in California. (surely California's contemporary take on the rotten borough is one of the symptoms of its decline). David Harmer for one is a solid Reagan conservative running in Richard Pombo's old district. Nick Popaditch is a Marine with an eyepatch who liberated Baghdad, and is the sort of person who has been sorely lacking from American politics. Best of all is Van Tran who has been running an unexpectedly strong race against Loretta Sanchez, one of the worst liberals in the state - a real modern day pink lady and an idiot besides.

Reading through Geraghty's list, it's a little nervous-making to see how many races are dead heats, within the margin of error, or (like Popaditch) not polled at all. Democrats have a depressed base, but they will still have their buses full of union rowdies, border crossing college kids, and "nod & wink" illegal alien voters, plus a Justice Department - not to mention news media - that will hype every polling irregularity they can find. Conservatives will only have each other. All I can say is, you'd better be registered to vote because no one is going to help you protect your right to do so.