Let’s start with the obvious. There will be no Armageddon, at least not this year.
If the world’s going to end — and, by the way, I’m not sure how gold coins help in that situation — it won’t be because Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling.
That’s the next big fight, as you know. Just minutes after the government shutdown was officially averted — call it blinkmanship, in which both sides equally feared the possible consequences — the next showdown was already being showcased.
It’s a perfect situation for those who bring you 24-hour cable TV news — all confrontation, all the time.
In the next fight, as in the last, there will be posturing and there will be threats and there will be another whack at defunding Planned Parenthood and, yes, health care reform.
I can’t predict what will happen. But I can predict what won’t. What won’t happen is the worst — because failing to lift the debt ceiling would be a Rory McIlroy-size disaster, whereas a government shutdown would merely have been a large inconvenience.
Let me quote you a few experts on the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling, which would put American in default. (I know, we could sell off some assets — say, the Grand Canyon — to help pay off our debts, but that would be a terrible idea, at least in this real estate market.) It’s “obvious you can’t default.” That was Rep. Paul Ryan speaking. It would “bring collapse and calamity around the world.” That was Sen. Lindsey Graham. The Obama administration’s budget guy goes with “catastrophe.” That’s some real bipartisan would-be cataclysm for you.
And the irony is that, according to every expert I’ve heard, the worst thing you can do about the debt situation is to not raise the debt ceiling, which would throw the country into default, play havoc with worldwide confidence and possibly cause the teetering economy to crash.
So naturally, what John Boehner is telling us is that Republicans won’t go along with a new debt ceiling “without something really, really big attached to it.”
That’s where we stand as we begin Apocalypse Redux. I love the smell of audacity in the morning.
What comes next is up to Obama. He and Boehner just finished the $39 billion compromise, which was terrible policy — we need to cut, but not until the economy gets sounder — but may have been good politics. The liberal blogosphere went nuts. But the first poll, a CNN poll, showed Americans solidly support the compromise, with Democrats heavily in favor. Boehner may have been the clear winner in this negotiation, but the polling says the only people who don’t like the result are Republicans, particularly Tea Partyers, who, let’s be honest, don’t like any deal that Barack Obama likes.
Of course, Obama got what he wanted, in a Clintonian way. He didn’t want the cuts, but he was happy to take the role of compromiser at a time when most Americans want government to work — not shut down.
Having compromised, Obama now gives a speech Wednesday in which he will address entitlements and all the stuff he failed to mention in his first version of the 2012 budget — and he won’t have to mention the Democrats’ failure to pass a budget last year.
Obama won’t have the Clintonian luck of getting Newt Gingrich as a foil. But what he does have is the Ryan budget plan, which wants to make Medicare into a voucher plan. It also calls for severe budget cuts, particularly for the poor, but no tax hikes, even for the rich.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a setup for Obama to say that though Ryan made some good steps, he also made some, uh, slight missteps.
Trickle-down is over. We saw the poor results of Bush’s tax policies. We know — he’ll say — that you can’t close a $14 trillion debt without the wealthy chipping in more. He’ll say that Medicare and Medicaid need to be fixed, but it can’t happen by tossing the most vulnerable people to the whims of the marketplace.
It’s time for Obama to step up. He ducked out on much of the first budget fight, but he has just the right moment to say the time for games — and gamesmanship — is over.
The metaphor you most see on the liberals blogs is that Republicans are making this a hostage situation. Obama might try a paraphrase of the famous Pogo comic strip line to explain the stakes: We have met the hostage, and the hostage is us.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
