http://www.salon.com/news/budget_showdown/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2011/07/18/gop_winning_the_debt_ceiling_fightThe McConnell plan, at last glimpse, is a complicated three-party Rube Goldberg machine that would give Obama the power to raise the debt ceiling in three separate stages, in return for somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, and the creation of a "grand bargain" commission to decide further cuts that, somehow, could not be filibustered.
Ezra Klein is on the money: The evolving McConnell plan represents a significant GOP victory.
(snip the excerpt from Klein's analysis, quoted in the OP)
If this is a Republican failure, what does success look like? Douthat blasts the GOP for failing to make concessions, but another way to look at what just happened is as proof of exactly how good a deal you can get when you take the hardest line possible. Tea Partyers and other hard-line conservatives are squawking, but they should be celebrating. Republicans control only the House but are still on the brink of achieving a victory without historical precedent -- turning a normally routine vote to raise the debt ceiling into a major policy win.
What makes this all the more extraordinary is the release of new poll results reporting that 71 percent of survey respondents disapprove of how Republicans are handling the crisis. When you combine that news with Dean Baker's salient observation that Wall Street would never allow Republicans to go through with their threat not to raise the debt ceiling, you have to wonder why conservatives are so depressed. The people hate what the GOP is doing and Wall Street is adamantly opposed to the centerpiece of its strategy. Obama has all the cards he needs to keep calling the Republican debt ceiling bluff, and yet still he prematurely folds.
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