This morning I quoted an anonymously-sourced Wall Street Journal article indicating that the White House “has opened the door to a deal with Republicans” to link the debt ceiling vote to significant spending cuts. I and other commentators used this to argue that Obama seemed, well, bad at negotiating. I am not so sure I am wrong on that point, but I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn, since White House Press Secretary Jay Carney implicitly refuted the WSJ’s account this afternoon.
In comparatively strong language, Carney insisted that the debt ceiling vote “will” pass, and that it should and will be disconnected from policy positions regarding the long-term debt:
Q: And one last one. What’s the relationship between the speech and the debt ceiling vote
MR. CARNEY: The speech and the debt ceiling? We don’t believe there is a relationship between the two, and we don’t believe, going back to questions I had yesterday, that there should be a link between efforts to address our long-term deficit problem and debt problem and the imperative of raising the debt ceiling, which the President and all the leaders of Congress have said has to be done.
It will happen, because everyone recognizes the consequences of not doing it, which would be to throw the global economy into chaos, to halt on a dime the economic recovery that we’ve been experiencing and fought so hard to help foster. This is not an alternative. And we are confident that the Congress will vote accordingly.
This is encouraging. Similarly encouraging was Carney’s refutation of the notion that Obama, in his debt speech on Wednesday, would be whole-heartedly embracing the Simpson-Bowles debt plan, about which previously he had been lukewarm. These are encouraging news items, though of course the original stories—regarding the debt ceiling vote and the Simpson-Bowles plan—were presumably based on some sort of authoritative source leaking this stuff to reporters. Let’s just hope that Carney is the one in the loop on this stuff.
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