Frustration
For weeks I’ve been frustrated. The “Debt Ceiling” debate, waged on the Nightly News and twenty-four/seven on cable, has been all Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy set the tone, making the President the “bad guy” who refused to negotiate. McCarthy talked about how there couldn’t be a deal without more compromise. The Speaker used his “bully pulpit” to be the “good guy”, trying to “save money” for the American people. He painted Democrats as “loose spending, liberals with a ‘woke’ agenda.”
In short, Speaker McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus Republicans were winning the “messaging” war. The White House seemed to be sitting on its hands, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre constantly on defense. It was frustrating, particularly on an issue where Congress created the whole debt obligation in the first place. If they decided not to spend the money, then there wouldn’t be a debt. But since they DID pass the laws spending the money, Congress itself created the obligation to pay it.
Hostage
And now, they were (are?) holding the Nation hostage to their agenda: give us what we want, or we will throw the entire economy into disaster. It should be an easy message for the White House to “sell”: it’s Congress’s mess to clean up. But the Administration did little to fight the battle in the media. It was frustrating for me, to say the least.
That is, until former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained what the President was doing.
As the former “voice” of the White House, Psaki shared her frustration with the messaging war. But she made a very important point: that the “war” wasn’t really about messaging. The “war” was to avoid a US Government debt default and the catastrophic national and world consequences that would occur. It wasn’t that the White House didn’t care about the messaging, but was focused instead on the result. If a deal could be reached, then in the end, President Biden could take the credit for saving the economy. If the negotiations failed, then Biden would share in the blame.
Public v Private
The problem with all of the public posturing is that positions get “frozen”. If you promise something publicly, then failure to achieve that promise is just that, a public failure. It makes private negotiations difficult, because the public promises become “deal breakers”. Those “deal breakers” break both ways too. What McCarthy promises in public his Freedom Caucus backers demand he achieve in private. And Biden also has a constituency to worry about: the “Progressive Caucus” in the House and Senate who already feel like they been left “holding the bag” on earlier legislative efforts.
Progressives aren’t going to like any deal with McCarthy. Members like Congressman Jamie Raskins of Maryland demand that instead of negotiating, President Biden invoke an obscure and untested clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They want Biden to ignore the Republicans and order the Treasury Department to continue to borrow money. That’s the kind of Constitutional confrontation Biden avoids, like proposals to re-balance the Supreme Court by increasing the number of Justices on the bench, or ending the Senate filibuster.
Binary Choice
So the President hasn’t said what his team demanded, or, more importantly, what they were willing to give away. That’s all going to come out, now that there’s a deal on the table. The extremes of both parties will have to decide whether to be responsible for accepting the deal, or tanking the economy. That “binary choice” should be enough to get compromise through (though the key word there is “should”), with more moderate Democrats joining with “less Freedom Caucus-ie” Republicans. And that’s what President Biden wants.
Speaker McCarthy has his own problems. While he may have won the short-term messaging battle, now he’s going to have to convince some of his core Republican backers to accept much less than he publicly demanded. For a man who fought for weeks to become Speaker, only squeaking by on the fifteenth ballot by a few votes; any opposition could cost him the Speakership. Those same Freedom Caucus members were able to push John Boehner out of the Speaker’s job in 2015, and are a thousand-fold more powerful now.
Friday the news broke that there was “a deal”. Congress went home for the Memorial Day weekend, and the President stayed at nearby Camp David for the holiday. Come Tuesday, the details of the agreement will break, and both sides will begin the hard task of convincing their “friends” that the deal is worth their sacrificing cherished changes. What happens now in the hallways and offices of the Congress will be intense.
Both sides will declare “victory” in the end; but if a default is avoided, then Joe Biden is the real winner, of the messaging, and the war. He’s smarter than you think.
