Ari Melber: "Report: On Debt, Democrats Rebel Against Compromiser-in-Chief"

Ari Melber (The Nation):

Presidents always have some tension with the parties that they lead, but Drew's sources suggest a White House political strategy that is now fundamentally at odds with congressional Democrats.
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The key allegation in Drew's article is that Obama is not only giving too much away (e.g. needlessly undercutting spending, stimulus, seniors or Medicare), but that he is doing so to politically save only himself.
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Obama has made Republicans "look bad," Drew concludes, but he is not actually getting much for it. I'd go even further. By fully caving on this stand-off, where the White House is backed by the general public and large swaths of the GOP (the financial community and the well-informed), Obama would not only fail to impress independent voters, he'd ensure a drubbing on a series of future fights, large and small, with his unreasonable opponents.

Some politics really is like parenting. You don't reward tantrums. MORE...

Elizabeth Drew on Obama and the debt limit: "What Were They Thinking?"

Pete Souza/White House---President Barack Obama at a meeting with his advisers in the Oval Office, June 8, 2011

Elizabeth Drew (NY Review of Books):

Someday people will look back and wonder, what were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult? Many experts on the economy believe that the President has it backward: that focusing on growth and jobs is more urgent in the near term than cutting the deficit, even if such expenditures require borrowing. But that would go against Obama’s new self-portrait as a fiscally responsible centrist.

Lawrence Summers, Obama’s recently resigned chief economic adviser, said on The Charlie Rose Show in July that he found it “dispiriting” that “all of the energy is on the projected deficits…when the problem right now is that the economy is in danger of stagnating from lack of demand.” MORE...

H/t to Ari Melber and Booman. Gaius Publius (AMERICAblog) also comments on this and tosses Paul Krugman into the conversation.