The night the president lost his party

For all the argument about how the Republicans would act as D-day (for Default) approaches, it is the division among the Democrats that seems to have assured the outcome.

The moment Harry Reid put forth a plan to reduce spending by $270 billion a year and not raise revenue, it all but ensured we will see a no-tax-increase deal (ignore the outrage about the $1T over 10 years from the drawdown in Afghanistan and Iraq; Karzai wants us out, and I don’t think Maliki et al wish us to stay).

It also means something else: Barack Obama has basically lost control of the Democrats in Washington. That’s a big deal. Bill Clinton never ended up in the same position in 1995 (of course, he also never called for a tax increase that year). Reid has a huge class of Senators to defend in 2012, and I’m thinking someone has alerted him that his best chance of hanging on to his Senate majority may be playing a foil to Insert-incoming-Republican-President-here, rather than defending Obama; the also large class up for re-election in 2014 is probably all but begging to able to run against Insert-GOP-Administration-here.

This isn’t to say Reid would deliberately sabatoge the president. It does mean that his own re-election as Majority Leader is more important to him than the president’s re-election. That, I believe, was the impetus behind Reid’s move.

Expect Reid and Boehner to work out a deal in the next few days, then present it to the President over the weekend. If the president vetoes it, he’ll be isolated, held personally responsible for the default, and forever frozen in the moment when he rejected an agreement reached by both parties in Congress.

In other words, Barack Obama just got Alinskied.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal

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