A Clean Debt Ceiling Increase Wouldn't Avoid Cuts

I've been in a few conversations with various people this week citing one strategy or another that they claim could have produced a "clean" debt ceiling increase and avoided the current legislative crisis. I basically agree with all these theories. Obama could have gotten a debt ceiling increase built into the December 2010 tax deal, and Obama could have simply demanded a clean debt ceiling increase and probably gotten one months ago. But I'm not sure this is a case of bad negotiating strategy or good negotiating strategy.

We've seen so much mockery of "11-dimensional chess" that I think people have gotten unduly reluctant to credit the idea that there's a bit of regular old chess happening here where you have to think one or two moves ahead. In particular, if we had a clean debt ceiling increase, that wouldn't change the fact that Republicans control the House and Republicans want spending cuts. All that would happen is we'd roll into September, when the current set of discretionary appropriations are set to expire, with Republicans demanding that any new appropriations deal feature spending caps, entitlement cut commissions, etc. In other words, the fight we're having in July would be happening in September. I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether having the fight now is better than having the fight then, but I don't think it's by any means crazy for the White House to suppose that the current timing is more favorable to the progressive side or crazy to believe that they did, in fact, see two moves ahead and decide they preferred this outcome.