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Apocalypse Now: 20112011-07-25

 

I swore to myself I was going to treat the debt limit negotiations going on in Washington with the same disdain and lack of interest that I was paying to the NFL lockout because, after all, they’re so similar: the solutions are hidden behind a shell game of numbers, both sides posture endlessly at the expense of the most marginal members, the people in the cheap seats get angry and discouraged, and at 11:59 p.m., just as certainly as Lucy Van Pelt will pull the football away from the onrushing Charlie Brown, there’ll be a last minute solution that all sides grudgingly accept to allow the season to go on. 

 
The great tragedy is, it’s now 11:57, and it looks like the only ones smart enough to pass Economics 101 are the guys in the plastic helmets,. Meanwhile, Washington’s leaders look more and more like they inhabit the same moral universe as Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore in the movie Apocalypse Now who defined victory in Vietnam with the famous cinematic quote, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
 
Kilgore’s soliloquy defined absolute and total napalm victory because his soldiers couldn’t find a single enemy body afterwards, but forty-five years later, we now know the costs of napalm were borne physically and psychologically on both sides.
 
The Vietnam analogy is particularly apt because, like the debt limit, neither was a primary concern of the vast majority of the American public, but we all got dragged into it for specious reasons due to abstract philosophical beliefs. In hindsight, will we see this train wreck of a debt hostage negotiation with any more charity than the decisions that led to losing 57,000 Americans while propping up a corrupt and illegitimate South Vietnamese government in the name of halting Communism?
 
Having given up not caring, I’m dubious there’s going to be a debt deal at 12:01, let alone 11:59, because in a game of high stakes brinksmanship, at least one side has to believe what can be gained is greater than what will be lost--and neither side is there yet. Make no mistake, this is TARP, Part 2, with the 2012 Presidential election as the ultimate prize for those doing the negotiating--and the American public paying the price.
 
Fundamentally, I don’t believe Speaker of the House John Boehner can get enough votes from his caucus for any new revenue until the napalm goes off in the form of billions of dollars lost in the stock market. Likewise, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi isn’t likely to sign off on a deal that neuters the Social Security and Medicare issues that have served House Democratic campaigns so well for decades. 
 
Republican strategists are reading polls that say Americans want the government to live within its means, while their Democratic counterparts have the same research that says Americans overwhelmingly want to protect their entitlement programs. What neither side is recognizing is a broad swath of the American electorate is saying, “a pox on both of your houses” because a government debt limit to most people struggling to put food on the table has absolutely no meaning. 
 
Ultimately, the Republican Party is playing the Jimmy Carter gambit. They believe whichever candidate wins their nomination will be able to vault to power next year asking the same question Ronald Reagan successfully did in 1980 during a previous recession: “Are you better or worse off than you were four years ago?” In this  parallel universe, it makes complete sense to hold the hard line on spending to placate conservatives and damn be the consequences over the next 16 months.
 
Meanwhile, President Obama is triangulating like mad to protect his post-partisan brand as the person who can solve problems in Washington, D.C. at the expense of alienating his more liberal base of supporters who want their own pound of flesh out of the Republicans’ hide.
 
So who wins the great napalm war of 2011? The answer is the same as it was during Colonel Kilgore’s reign: the folks who manufacture the chemicals. If the yuan or the euro becomes the world’s currency during this decade, we’ll be able to look at this moment in history as a causal link because for the first time, regardless of which party was in power, the full faith and credit of the United States government will have been called into question. But at least we’ll be able to watch the Super Bowl.
 
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