as political losers on this regardless of whether a deal is reached. explain. i think republicans right now i mean, i sort of start off talking about the punch line of the old joke, what s mine is mine, what s yours is negotiable. what s happening is we don t know whether president obama could have made stick with democrats on capitol hill. entitlement cuts, domestic spending cuts. we don t know whether they would have been able to compromise and do the right thing or not. the way republicans are coming across is so enflixible, so indoctrineaire, to over to their bases, they re losing this fight. i think this is a fight for independence. 90%, 95% of the people in each party vote for candidates in its party, and turnout does not vary much from year to year. it s about independents. what republicans are doing is playing a losing hand toward independent voters. the president seems to believe that. he almost cloaked himself today
he s warning us right and left, if the debt ceiling gets close and not raised in time, the fragile recovery is going to have the pins kicked out from beneath it. i think one reason he s saying he no longer wants a clean debt ceiling is americans are concerned about spending rather than raising the debt ceiling. he s saying, i had to spend a lot of money because the economic crisis when i took over, but i m trying to take steps now to deal with it. it s interesting. he had had a message to progressives as well. he said, we can t have the conversation be he was making the case that you want a big deal and you want to try to do this, even after the debt ceiling because, if the debt is an excuse not to do something, then you can t do an investment in a new education program or you can t do a special investment in a new infrastructure project, is that going to resonate? i think he ll have some problems with liberal democrats, who are not going to be happy
with changes in social security and medicare, who will want to higher taxes for the wealthy that s not going to be a part of it. there s no indication there will be fintaxes in the final deal. on the other hand, democrats are likely to follow the president. we find that even the most liberal democrats still support the president wanting to be reele reelected. he s not getting challenged in primaries. so he s still in a relatively strong position there. it s a big difference. the progressive elite may think one thing, but when you look at the rank and file and look at these polls, they re with him. susan page, bureau chief for america s newspaper usa today. thanks, chuck. coming up, what happens politically if republicans and democrats don t reach a deal and the u.s. does somehow go into default? the deal is not done done. will voters blame the president for the political consequences, the republicans for not making a deal, all of washington? just one phillips colon health prob
and this idea that the debt ceiling, the burden would be put on the president. if that s the eventual deal to raise the debt ceiling, are you going to support that? chuck, again, i would be crazy to say in advance, without seeing the particular language on this deal, how i m going to vote. we all know the devil is in the details. let me give you one example. of the $1.1 trillion we were talking about with respect to discretionary spending, one of the sticking points throughout the biden talks and something that continues to be a sticking point is to create firewalls so all the cuts don t come out of education, out of research, cures for cancer. we also say that the pentagon and some of the security agencies are going to take their fair share of the cuts. until we know what that firewall to make sure that there s a fair allocation of the cuts, it s impossible to say speaking for myself. how to move forward on that
deal would be reached and we were to go into some sort of default? i think, perhaps the republicans still get blamed initially, but ultimately if the secretary of the treasury is right and the calamity happens that he says would, i don t see how anybody in office escapes the blame, especially the president, who would be the one presiding over the country at a time of 10%, 11% unemployment if all of these terrible things happened. and that s got to be bad for him. charlie cook, we know the american public has a short attention span sometimes, but they ve been angry for three straight elections. fired the republicans in 06, fired them in 08, then the public was mad at the democrats, fired them from control of congress. if washington is not working right now, at what point does the public throw up their hands, fire both of them, and look a third way? not since perot 92 has there been a vacuum, it seems, that someone from the outside can