So Washington will just have to make do with government-as-normal after all. Oh well. The White House appears to have decided that the best way to respond to defeat is to just call it victory and hope no-one notices. Hence President Obama’s speech this evening in which he will take credit for a budget deal he resisted. That’s fine. That’s politics.
The numbers, of course, are trivial. A $38bn cut in federal outlays is a fraction of a tiny fraction of the matter. Nevertheless, it’s a political victory for the GOP, not least since spending-restraint is not something this President is interested in. Nor, of course, was his predecessor but that was then and this is now. To the extent framing matters, it’s Republicans 1 Democrats 0 even though no-one, obviously, can be very impressed with any of the actual budget plans scuttling up and down Pennsylvania Avenue these past few days.
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