WARNINGS INCREASE FOR REPUBLICANS – AT 9:43 A.M. ET:   There are increasing warnings to Republicans from some of the party's smartest supporters that they must get their act together and come to some agreement with Obama on the debt crisis.  Otherwise, these advisers fear, Republicans will be blamed for any government shutdown, with possibly devastating political results in 2012.

We've issued the same warnings here.  And now the financial columnist, Spengler (a pen name), whom I've met a number of times, puts the issue in perspective:

President Barack Obama's best hope of re-election lies in provoking Republicans to force the United States into technical default, engineering a brief but severe financial crisis in order to appear as crisis-manager-in-chief. The Tea Party movement may be marching into a political ambush, in which Obama will be able to portray the born-again budget-cutters as irresponsible fanatics who threaten to tip America into a new depression. The now unpopular president then would assume the role of national savior in time of crisis.

That's dead on.  That's the way these boys work, and naive tea partiers may force the GOP into just such a situation.

The liberal punditeska heaps contempt on the Tea Party as a bunch of dumb yahoos. If they're so dumb, though, why are they so powerful? The fact that a ragtag army of political amateurs could overturn the status quo in the 2010 elections shows that their unifying issue has legs: people don't want to pay taxes to cover budget deficits that pay outsized benefits for other people. That's why Republicans are crushing the public-employee unions in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Jersey, and other fiscal battlefields, and why smart Democrats like New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo have been born again as fiscal conservatives.

But the Tea Partiers remain amateurs, after all, and vulnerable to a sucker punch. They don't seem to understand that the separation of powers is designed to slow the pace of change. A Republican administration, moreover, can't govern on the Tea Party program. It is a protest movement, and a valid one, but not a governing coalition. If the Tea Party expends all its ammunition in the debt-ceiling showdown with the President, it may take the Republicans down with it. The winning strategy is to keep the blame for failure on Obama through November 2012.

COMMENT:  Wise thinking from a very solid and knowledgeable writer.  Part of governing is having the right ideas.  The other part is knowing how to put them into practice.  It's that second part that requires skillful and experienced political operators.  There's nothing shameful about the word "politician."  It's shameful when people on our side are incompetent politicians.  There's big punishment for that. 

July 19, 2011