Compromise, compromise

In the ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations, several things have become clear:

• Obama's main goal is to get to yes. Perhaps this is due to his elevation of responsibility over conviction, as George Packer argues (via David Gibson); certainly Obama also wants to ride this grand bargain to reelection.
• Republican leaders' main incentive is to prevent this.
• Speaker Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are further motivated by their own fight for control of House Republicans.
• The policy debate is quite narrow: should Democrats give in to all of Republicans' demands, or just most of them?

In other words, there isn't a serious policy debate here. Publicly at least, most elected officials agree that we need major spending cuts. So finding common ground should be easy--except that the fight isn't about how much to cut or whether to raise taxes a bit, too. It's about zero-sum electoral politics.

But count on the mainstream news media to conflate the two--in service of the timeless trope that everyone just needs to meet in the middle of wherever they are right now.