Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Visual source: Newseum

Late deal and lots of details make pundit analysis a bit slow... expect more as the weekend goes on...

Ben Feller/AP:

It was Obama's veto threat that made clear he would not accept the scope of spending cuts Republicans wanted. It was Obama who said he would accept no more short-term bills to keep the government afloat for a couple weeks at a time unless there was a broader deal in hand. And it was Obama who kept saying it was time for leaders to act like grown-ups.

The White House said his strategy was to stay behind the scenes, work the phones and let his senior aides do the negotiating. That hard-to-see engagement provided a huge opening for Republicans to question his leadership. And it led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his own Democratic Party who wanted Obama to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted.

The White House figured it would take those hits. In the midst of this conflict and other challenges, a Gallup poll in late March found that an eroding number of people said Obama was a strong and decisive leader: A little more than half of those polled, down from 60 percent one year ago and 73 percent two years ago.

The West Wing thinking was that a better result would come if Obama not try to overheat the issue. They also believed that people across the nation were worried about gas prices, not a messy political squabble over a spending bill and that the voters didn't hire Obama to be a legislator. Obama would go public when it meant the most.

Dan Balz:

This is all just leading to 2012 and what is going to be a seismic election,? said Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Republicans and Democrats face more difficult negotiations later this year over raising the debt ceiling and then a budget for the fiscal year that begins next October. The question is whether this clash has helped build relationships and mutual trust that will make those battles easier or whether it will embolden either side to dig in, hoping to gain ultimate political victory.

WaPo:

The Democrats left Thursday night?s talks convinced that Boehner had agreed to a deal, only to be told hours later by his staff that he had not, said one Democratic official, who agreed to discuss the details of the negotiations on the condition that he not be identified.

Boehner might have sown some of this confusion deliberately, to keep Democrats ? and some of his own colleagues ? off balance.

The WaPo sucking up to Boehner and calling his dithering and inability to control his caucus "leadership"? I'm shocked - shocked - to find that there's gambling in this casino.

Ezra Klein:

So though the fight over Planned Parenthood might be about abortion, Planned Parenthood itself isn?t about abortion. It?s primarily about contraception and reproductive health. And if Planned Parenthood loses funding, what will mainly happen is that cancer screenings and contraception and STD testing will become less available to poorer people. Folks with more money, of course, have many other ways to receive all these services, and tend to get them elsewhere already.

The fight also isn?t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money.

Colbert I King makes the Beltway mistake of accepting that Social Security is part of the deficit problem (it's not), doesn't get that increased revenue is part of the deficit solution, but does get this:

At bottom, the GOP?s approach to solving the debt crisis is driven by an elitist notion that holds that unfit people, because of wrongheaded Washington policies, have been receiving unwarranted benefits at the expense of more deserving, and better off, Americans. Implicit in the GOP plan is the idea that it is not only fiscally prudent but also morally correct to use the budget to chart a new path. The 2012 budget, said Ryan, ?represents a new federal commitment, assuring this nation?s workers, investors and entrepreneurs that the new House majority recognizes the threat that unlimited government poses to the American way of life.?

David Frum/CNN:

Good news:

The dealmakers in both parties have prevailed over the confrontationalists in both parties. Speaker John Boehner persuaded his Republican Congress to accept "yes" for an answer. President Obama resisted the temptation to entrap the Republicans in a shutdown that would almost certainly have hurt the GOP more than it would have hurt him.

Bad news:

The debate dramatizes how completely budget policy has displaced economic policy in Washington debate. Tonight's action may help stabilize federal finances. But even economists who support spending cuts will acknowledge that the immediate effect of cuts is to subtract demand from the economy. A strongly growing economy can sustain and benefit from this demand-subtraction. The US economy in 2011 is not a strongly growing economy. Yet how much time has the new Congress spent debating ideas to accelerate growth

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/SMQ0XxazwNA/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up

Rush Limbaugh Obama