I was all set to write a long post about Obama and the debt ceiling, and then Matt Yglesias goes ahead and does it right before I do. Damn time zones! Read his post, he makes a lot of the points I wanted to. Also, Kevin Drum makes a similar argument, though somewhat more sympathetically.

Here’s how I see it: that Obama has used the debt ceiling issue to push for a big debt deal is more or less an admission that he hasn’t been able to change Washington, and that it’s still the case that the only time the government does any work is when a crisis is imminent. There are a hundred things Obama could have done differently to avoid our current crisis, from insisting on a clean hike to exploring a “Constitutional option” based on the 14th Amendment, to stiffing defense contractors to bring pressure on their Republican allies. He’s not done any of them, in fact, he’s signaled that he’s the one obsessed with a deal. He’s avoided “kicking the can down the road” in the form of short-term hikes. He’s implored Republicans in joining him in doing “big things.” There are also a hundred signs here to show that Obama is truly desperate for a debt deal that you can find without looking hard. I have no doubt he thinks he’s doing the best thing for the country, and his economic advisers have no doubt channeled the deficit echo chamber in his direction. But I really have to question whether putting the sorts of negotiations that almost always fail up against a possible recession-causing deadline, when dealing with an opposition that denies any and all inconvenient facts and would probably benefit from a default, is the sort of sober-minded, careful leadership that we were told Obama would provide. Feels to me a lot more like the reckless gambling of John McCain to me, an attempt to get something done and change the narrative. I really don’t see an adequate appreciation of the stakes here.

I can understand why the deficit hawk-heavy White House Economic Team wants such a deal, and I can see why they think it would be a good thing politically. But will one great moment of Awesome Bipartisanship shine through another eighteen months of lousy employment numbers and modest growth? In the end, what we’ll wind up with is a Republican-friendly package of cuts that Republicans will nonetheless demagogue, as they do, as well a left that sees Obama as a traitor for making a bad deal on cuts and might not turn out to vote because of it, meanwhile we have a public that doesn’t really seem to understand what exactly a deficit is and is more concerned with kitchen table issues. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tim Geithner is the driving force behind this strategy, as the man has a particularly daft sense of politics, and not just on the financial regs thing. I don’t get it. Rigging everything so that Failure Is Not An Option makes little sense considering that a negotiating failure is not nearly the worst outcome I can foresee here.