With the S&P downgrade of U.S. government debt on Friday, it is time for the Obama Administration to hit the reset button.\u00a0 The question in Washington and around the country is, does the Administration have it within itself to do that?<\/p>\n
The answer is probably no.\u00a0 During an interview that ran in Saturday\u2019s Wall Street Journal<\/em>, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor sketched a disturbing portrait of the president in the recent debt talks with leaders of both parties at the White House.\u00a0 According to Cantor, when challenged during the talks, the president became \u201cvisibly agitated.\u201d\u00a0 Cantor added, \u201cIt\u2019s almost as if someone cannot have another opinion that is different from his.\u201d<\/p>\n The House majority leader also noted that the president invoked Ronald Reagan, not to establish common ground with the Republicans, but \u201cto be a little patronizing of [Republican negotiators], because he assumed that anything Reagan did we like.\u201d\u00a0 Democrats have disputed Mr. Cantor\u2019s characterization of the meetings, but the same demeaning trope has been evident in the president\u2019s speeches.\u00a0 It is of a piece with the president\u2019s inexplicable tactic at the beginning of the talks, when he invited House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan to his key budget speech at George Washington University, seated him in the front row, and then delivered an address insulting to Ryan and House Republicans.<\/p>\n Cantor was describing the talks that Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rescued by bypassing the president.\u00a0 Two Saturdays ago, a day after the House of Representatives voted for Speaker John Boehner\u2019s budget plan, McConnell picked up the phone and called Vice President Joe Biden.\u00a0 He knew that Biden understood the art of negotiation and compromise as much as the president did not.\u00a0 Within hours they had on track the agreement that passed Congress late last week.<\/p>\n The Administration has slammed Tea Party members of Congress for their refusal to consider tax increases and faux spending cuts, the preferred course of Democrats in the House and Senate, but similarly, if not at the same decibel level, opposed by all GOP members of Congress.\u00a0 The truth is that the Tea Party and the GOP may have saved the markets and rating agencies from taking an even worse view of the U.S. government\u2019s ability to control its spending and borrowing.<\/p>\n The talks needed a bad guy on the no-tax-less-spending side, and the Tea Party caucus gave them that.\u00a0 Thanks in part to the Tea Party members\u2019 place in the negotiating dynamics, the final deal had serious elements of cost control in it, though obviously not enough to satisfy the global markets.<\/p>\n