The Federal Debt Limit Debate: A Leadership Opportunity
Jules Witcover

In the critical debate over raising the federal debt limit, which has captured center stage here this summer, no single Republican has been carrying the ball for the deep spending cuts advocated by the party as a whole.

With President Obama finally stepping in to lead the Democrats, the case for the opposition party remains in the hands of its congressional leaders. House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan all are speaking for the Republicans.

Nor has any clear GOP leader on the issue emerged from the large field of 2012 presidential hopefuls, who collectively have occupied a back seat in the fray. Most timidly half-embraced Ryan's sweeping proposals for deep spending cuts when first made, and relatively speaking they have avoided the debate since then.

The White House aspirants instead have focused on general attacks on Obama as a loser. They cast him as a failed president unable lift the country to economic recovery with his stimulus package, and bogged down in unemployment, now at 9.2 percent in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation.

Boehner as the head of the Republican majority in the House is the closest figure to a party spokesman on the issue. He has been elevated to that stature by his several one-on-one meetings with Obama, including that highly publicized day on the golf course, which was more show than substance.

But Boehner is limited not only by the presence of all the other Republicans speaking out for the party. The Tea Party members in his caucus have conspicuously continued their take-no-prisoners stance against any tax increases as part of a debt-reduction deal. Nudging them off it in any compromise won't be easy.

Accordingly, the president of the United States should find himself in more of a commanding position in the argument than he has been, even as he has taken over the negotiations from Vice President Joe Biden, who carried the ball as far as he could until Cantor walked away.

While Obama has talked about the cataclysmic consequences for the nation if Congress fails to raise the debt limit, the political stakes for him could be dire as well. His late decision to up the ante in the negotiations by challenging the Republicans to agree to much deeper deficit reduction was a bold move to assert leadership in the debate.

For the first time, he sought to take command from the GOP congressional leaders, in a sense calling their bluff on the scope of the undertaking rather than leaving the impression of being dragged kicking and screaming into the effort to avoid a fiscal train wreck.

Doing "something big" as Obama proposed, however, would seem unavoidably to include tackling the climbing cost of entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- at the core of the social safety net that has been the Democrats' most cherished accomplishment. It has rightly been dubbed the third rail of American politics; to touch it has been to commit political suicide.

Also, Obama's most justifiable political argument against the Republicans has been to highlight their insistence on retaining the Bush tax cuts for the rich, charging them with protecting millionaires and billionaires on the backs of the middle class and poor. Polls have repeatedly indicated that voters prefer taxing the wealthy more heavily to weakening the social safety net. But that argument didn't help Obama avert the "shellacking" he took in the congressional midterm elections last November.

One thing Obama can't afford is the perception that he is caving in again, as in his last budget compromise with the Republicans, when he swallowed those Bush tax cuts for the rich for another two years. To come out a winner this time, any compromise must be seen as one in which he gets at least as much as he gives up.

The president meanwhile seems to have dismissed the idea that he could and should invoke the 14th Amendment upholding "the validity of the public debt." But if refusal to raise the debt limit would be as catastrophic as Obama says, then taking the issue out of congressional hands by executive action could be his only recourse.

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