WH advisor straps on the suicide bomb of hope and blows up the future

Here’s video of White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer, reacting to a Bloomberg News poll which shows that, by two-to-one, Americans don’t want the debt ceiling raised without conditions. Perhaps caught a bit off-guard by CNN’s Jake Tapper, he goes straight to calling the Republicans suicide bombers.

The White House insists it won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling because that would offend the gods — it’s the full faith and credit of the United States of America! Perhaps the Republicans are asking for too much at the moment, but this is what negotiation is for — and there have been many, many previous horse-trades over debt ceiling deals, going back at least to the Reagan administration.

There is a dynamic at work here that I think eludes most of the people covering the debt limit as if it were some kind of sacred cow. They see the Congress threatening to blow something up. That’s not the only thing at work here. The public wants to blow something up.

As the Bloomberg poll in this segment shows, it’s quite a liability for a congressman to vote for a debt limit increase without attaching conditions. An insistence on doing so is a case of good representation. This is why President Obama, as a senator, voted against debt limit increases. That’s why conditions get attached, so that a public demand (for spending reforms and cuts especially) is met.

So this isn’t just a case of Republicans threatening to blow up the bond market. This is what the public wants — negotiation, regardless of where it goes. The very negotiations the White House doesn’t want.