Debt deal: Will it help Obama or hurt him?

This may be remembered as the week that Barack Obama “became a one-termer,” said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. Washington bureaucrats are still studying the deficit-reduction plan that ended the stalemate over raising the national debt limit. In the wider nation, however, President Obama’s reputation has already taken a major hit in the polls, from which it will likely never recover. The president said throughout the debt-ceiling talks that he would support only a plan that raised taxes on the wealthy, but in the end he signed off on exactly what the Republicans wanted: a bill that will cut spending by $1.5 trillion without raising a penny in new revenues. Obama’s capitulation has emboldened his enemies, “dismayed many in his party,” and made him look like “a loser,” said Clive Crook in the Financial Times. “Whatever comes next, his presidency is in trouble.”

He could have done much worse, said Thomas DeFrank in the New York Daily News. In the final flurry of negotiations, Obama successfully “pushed back the next debt-extension donnybrook to 2013, guaranteeing that this summer’s legislative chaos won’t be rerun during next year’s campaign.” Better still, by his willingness to deal with intransigent Republicans, he came away yet again looking like “the only grown-up in the sandbox,” which can only help him in 2012, particularly with vital moderates and independents who favor compromise over ideological rigor. The president didn’t handle this perfectly, said Matthew Dickinson in Salon.com, but he got there in the end. Considering that he was facing opponents who would rather default on the national debt and trigger a full-blown economic depression than raise taxes on millionaires by a single penny, “this is probably the best deal Obama was going to negotiate.”

Don’t let whining liberals mislead you, said Emily Miller in The Wash­ington Times. In reality this was a “grand slam” for President Obama. He went into the debt-ceiling negotiations with three objectives: raise the debt limit, delay the next showdown until after the election, and avoid any real spending cuts. In the end, “he got everything.” For all the talk of trillion-dollar savings, the final bill contains a mere $12 billion in immediate cuts, leaving the rest to be determined by a still nonexistent “bipartisan commission.” And the terms of that commission are very much “to Obama’s advantage,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. Negotiations there may yet yield the tax hikes he’s been after. If they don’t, Republicans will have to watch their beloved defense budget get slashed, and shoulder blame for politically toxic cuts to Medicare and Social Security. It may look now like the president lost this fight, but we’ve learned time and again that it’s “always best to look at Obama’s decisions, even the most desperate ones, from the rearview mirror.”

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In politics, though, perception is everything, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. It’s possible to make the case that Obama cleverly outmaneuvered his opponents, but that isn’t how it looked to the public, and ultimately that’s all that matters. American voters still like Obama personally, and even broadly agree with his policies, but they are losing patience with his “passive-aggressive approach” to governing—always compromising, refusing to take a stand, winning while appearing to lose—and are increasingly starting to see his as yet another “failed presidency.” Once that label attaches, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge.