Obama Is Going to Have to Cave

Here you read why the president has foolishly overplayed his hand. From Charles Krauthammer:

To be sure, the administration has, as always, overplayed a good hand with punitive shutdowns — such as of the World War II Memorial — clearly intended to be blamed on the GOP.

People aren’t that stupid. They know a gratuitous abuse of government (lockout) power when they see it. Moreover, Republicans have been passing partial-funding bills for such things as national monuments and cancer research, forcing Harry Reid’s Democratic Senate to kill them with a stone-cold heart.

Even worse for Democrats, their current partisan advantage is a wasting asset. The rule is simple: shutdown good, debt ceiling bad. Every day the debt ceiling approaches, President Obama’s leverage diminishes.

Obama insists he won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling as a matter of principle. It’s never been used as leverage for extraneous (i.e., non-budgetary) demands, he claims.

Nonsense. It’s been so used dozens of times going back at least to 1973, when Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale tried to force campaign-finance reform on President Nixon. Obama himself voted against raising the debt ceiling when he was a senator in 2006.

So much for principle. Moreover, should Obama miscalculate the brinkmanship, he’ll become the first president to ever allow a default. Precisely opposite to the principle he pretends to be espousing — and ruinous to what’s left of his presidency. Breaching the debt ceiling would indeed, as he claims, be an economic disaster, aborting an already historically anemic recovery. As president, he would take the blame. He can’t allow it.

It’s a bluff. He will blink.