Better in their words…

Obama and the Debt Crisis – Noonan.

Well…?

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The debate in Washington is serious as a heart attack: whether the
United States should raise its debt ceiling so it can borrow more money
to stay afloat. The statutory ceiling on our national debt—our legal
borrowing limit—is $14.3 trillion. That limit was reached, according to
the Treasury Department, on May 16. Treasury says it can make do until
early August, when the ceiling must be raised by $2.4 trillion.

Congressional Republicans have made their stand clear: They will
agree to raise the limit only if it is accompanied by spending cuts or
reforms.

The Democrats want to raise the ceiling, period.

The Republicans are being hard-line because of the base, and the base
is hard-line for two reasons. First, we are in an unprecedented debt
crisis. Second, the past 40 years have taught them that if dramatic
action is not taken to stanch spending, Congress will spend more.
Something is needed to shock the system.

If Republicans can get the White House to cut where the money
is—Medicare—then Medicare, and all controversy over the Ryan plan, will
be taken off the table as an issue in the 2012 election. This would not
be good for Democrats. Democrats in turn would likely make some cuts in
spending if Republicans agree to some tax increases. But that would take
a great Republican issue off the table.

This week the House voted 318-97 against raising the ceiling without
cutting. The president and a group of House Republicans met this week to
talk about the apparent impasse. There is a chance they won’t come to
any agreement by August.

If no agreement is reached, what happens? Nobody knows, because it’s
never happened before. But economists warn: The dollar could crash,
interest rates spike, equity markets melt. Foreign investors would lose
confidence that America is worth risking their money and that Washington
is able to face and handle a crisis.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder
has noted in these pages that the bills for social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, defense and interest on the national debt amount to about
two-thirds of all federal outlays. “At some point [Treasury Secretary
Timothy] Geithner could wind up brooding over horrible questions like
these: Do we stop issuing checks for Social Security benefits, or for
soldiers’ pay, or for interest payments to the Chinese government?”

All
of this sounds fairly catastrophic, especially considering this week’s
evidence that America’s economic recovery is stalled. Housing prices are
down, job creation weak, manufacturing growth slowed, factory activity
down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 280 points on Wednesday.

So this would seem to be a bad time to be playing chicken.

Democrats think if push comes to shove and an agreement is not
reached, public opinion will go against the Republicans. This may be
true. Republicans think if agreement is not reached, responsibility will
redound on the president. They may be true too.

But again, this isn’t a good time to play Let’s Find Out.

Democrats are right that the debt ceiling must be raised. Republicans
are right that the decision to raise the debt ceiling must be
accompanied by reforms or cuts to spending that equal or exceed the
amount of the raise, $2.4 trillion. Here’s why.

Default is unthinkable. We are the United States of America, and we pay our bills.

Raising the ceiling without attempting to control spending is a
depressing and wearying thought. It will avert crisis, yes, but there
would be no gain in it beyond that. It would demonstrate to the world
that we are not capable of taking necessary steps to dig our way out of
the spending mess. It would mean things just continue as they are.

But cutting and reforming—showing we can make tough decisions in a
crisis—will reassure the world, and our creditors. It will increase
faith in the United States, and increase an American sense of well
being: “We can do this, we can make it better.” It would be very good to
leave the world saying, “My God, the Americans are still competent.”

Washington should forget taxes for now—fight that out later. The
polls are all over the place, and no feasible amount of new revenue is
going to make a difference. Cutting is what matters. And the president
could play it so that he doesn’t lose. A crisis would have been
averted—on his watch. He could claim to have been conciliatory, looking
out for the national interest. The left won’t like it, but the center
will. And he will have shown he can work closely and in good faith with
Republicans, who control the House.

On that, a word. Talks on the debt ceiling
will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it’s
always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can’t
fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he
doesn’t bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to
patriotism—”Come on guys, we have to save this thing”—ring hollow from
him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why
conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South.
He was surrounded by them, and he wasn’t by nature an ideologue.

He absorbed not the biases of his region but of his generation and
his education (Ivy League). He had ambition: liberalism was rising and
he’d rise with it. And on the signal issues of his youth, Vietnam and
race, he thought the Democrats of the 1970s were right. But that didn’t
mean he didn’t understand and feel some sympathy for conservatives, and
as a political practitioner he had a certain sympathy for the
predicaments of his fellow pols. That’s why he could play ball with Newt
Gingrich and the class of 1994: because he didn’t quite hate everything
they stood for. He had a saving ambivalence.

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but
something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill
character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the
other fish.

He doesn’t know how to confuse his foes with “outreach,” with phone
calls, jokes, affection. He doesn’t leave them saying, as Reagan did, “I
just can’t help it, I like the guy.” And because he can’t confuse them
or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of
him: socialist, destroyer.

This isn’t good, and has had an impact on the president’s contacts
with Republicans. And it’s added an edge to an emerging campaign theme
among them. Two years ago I wrote
of Clare Booth Luce’s observation that all presidents have a sentence:
“He fought to hold the union together and end slavery.” “He brought
American through economic collapse and a world war.” You didn’t have to
be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn’t understand
his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a
broken political culture. These things weren’t his fault. But through
his decisions, he made them all worse.