Roll Call titled this article “Boehner Threads a Needle,” and I think that they have the right of it. If he had lost control of the debt ceiling process, Speaker Boehner would have been crippled for the rest of this term, and probably been out of the leadership cadre as soon as it could have been done without unnecessary embarrassment; as it is, the various factions of the GOP caucus have a pretty good idea of how far they can all push things before they run up against the Speaker of the House’s power, which is… considerable, in this country*.
Fortunately, this entire exercise should also give the Speaker an idea about how very, very seriously the Right is taking fiscal issues right now, too. Given that Speaker Boehner would very much like to keep being Speaker Boehner, that’s all to the good.
Moe Lane
PS: I know that a lot of folks are unhappy about the final deal: not enough ground was recaptured. True. We didn’t liberate Paris on June 7, 1944, either… oh, sorry, violent rhetoric. My bad.
*One reason why so few Speakers run for President; it’s almost as powerful a job and, apparently, often a lot more fun.
Boehner just isn’t smart enough …
“Boehner just isn’t smart enough …”
Smarter than Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, apparently.
“Smarter than Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, apparently.”
Come on, the guy deserves a higher bar to vault than *that*.
Free-range Oyster wins the thread.
Somebody ought to give Boehner some props for doing that response speech to Obama on TV the other night.
We always bash our side, not wrongly, for not communicating and not responding and Boehner, pretty much without precedent, did just that.
And, please, I implore everybody to remember how little attention “ordinary” people pay to politics. They don’t even get the sound bites, they only get the zeitgeist.
As of right now (to my mind) the zeitgeist is: Obama is a whiny baby who lusts for more taxes, Harry “who?” Reid is permanently out to lunch, and John Boehner is struggling mightily to hold the fractious Republicans together as they strive to cut spending and yet keep the full faith and credit stuff alive.
How were we going to do any better than that?
In the REAL world, the actual real, corrupted fallen world in which we live. The world in which Obama is president, Reid is the Senate Majority leader and the MSM hates us and always will.