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The debt ceiling looks like it will be raised, though who knows? The House Republicans believe they have won -- they at least are spinning that furiously, which presents the unlikely sight of a blackmailer crowing about his successful operation, joined by a variety of seething left-of-center pundits -- and with the scent of Obama blood in the water, maybe they'll hold out for even greater cuts or a deal that protects defense spending. Generally, as the media emerges in full-throated roar, Obama is being declared the big loser from both sides of the aisle; see Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman in today's New York Times. Perhaps. Obama's polls have been falling, probably because the president these days gets blamed for everything from a bad economy to Mississippi flooding to lousy student test scores, as if he's less a political leader and more a medicine man. We elect shamans, not people. Perhaps he did play this all wrong; in politics, substance -- "reality" that we've heard so much about these days -- means little. Obama's big mistake, at the end of the day, was his belief that he could occupy a center in a viciously polarized arena.
As the columns and blogs suggest this morning, we've got a deal, but we've also got a nasty political problem. From an electoral perspective -- and part of that political problem is that we can't seem to forget, for even a moment, the permanent campaign -- Obama is already being declared a loser in 2012. We'll see. The electoral issue, particularly in a presidential campaign, is what's more important: deficit reduction (with all the affiliated issues: tax hikes or entitlement cuts) or the blackmail problem, which is to say, the Congress problem. How big is the center these days? How will that center recall these events -- and the possibility that we may see more hostage taking in years ahead? The debt ceiling struggle was a long and ugly tussle, managing to confirm the conventional wisdom of Washington inaction, bloviation, stalemate and failure. It was wildly irresponsible, dangerous and absurd. It shook people up. Several weeks ago, the Times' Thomas Friedman saw the crisis as an opportunity for a "radical center" to emerge, independent of both increasingly toothless, in terms of discipline, parties. I'm skeptical of the formation of an actual center party but not of center bloc. Today, in the blitz of punditry and spin, the center seems to have vanished. But electorally, it does feel as if there's stirring discontent with the highly ideological approach to politics from both parties. That, of course, may be wishful thinking. 
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