Spin Cycle

President Biden and Kevin McCarthy emerged with a budget deal. Photos: Getty Images

A very weird thing often happens as soon as negotiators finish striking a bitterly fought deal, as the White House and Republican House leadership did over the long weekend. One side starts to bash on the other right away, and the other side seems to just lie there and take it, saying very little publicly in response. The former looks aggressive and confident, while the latter seems despondent and defeated.

We saw this happen as soon as white smoke metaphorically wafted up from where the parties were negotiating, signaling a tentative agreement to take back to their parties to sell. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson observed, this was “like a washing machine toward the end of its cycle, and we have shifted into the spin phase.”

Republican leadership was exuberant, crowing that the Democrats had gotten nothing in concessions and that it was a huge achievement. The Democrats? They barely said anything publicly.

This frustrated many progressives, who understandably worried that the White House had sold them and the most vulnerable Americans out. The details of the plan hadn’t been released yet, so why was the GOP so damned happy?

But things in Washington are almost never as they seem. The gleeful jabs and boasts from Republican leadership were actually a huge tell, as was the relatively muted response from top Democrats. Let’s walk through what they initially said, and then examine what’s really going on. Bear with me, because it will exemplify why average citizens are both bewildered and highly frustrated by political leaders on both sides, but this is just how politics has always worked.

McCarthy does a victory lap

After the two sides reached a tentative deal on Saturday following a ninety minute phone call between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy, one of the first things that McCarthy did was trash the president and lay the blame, unfairly, on him:

I just got off the phone with the president a bit ago. After he wasted time and refused to negotiate for months, we've come to an agreement in principle that is worthy of the American people.

He then told his GOP caucus that Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had complained to him, after Biden agreed to the deal, that there is “not one thing in the bill for Democrats.” 

His underlings repeated the gloating and bragging, saying that it was “a remarkable conservative achievement” and a “fantastic deal” that has “no wins for Democrats,” according to McCarthy supporter Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD).

This left many Americans, particularly those on the left, understandably wondering why it seemed the Democrats had simply rolled over to the GOP’s demands.

President Biden and Dem leadership go low key 

Initially, President Biden and top Democrats did nothing to allay these fears. Instead, their muted response presented a stark contrast to the taunting and boasting. Biden struck a conciliatory tone, dubbing it the “Bipartisan Budget Agreement” and saying that it was a critical deal that Congress had to pass in order to avoid default. His official statement was somber and straightforward and did nothing to bash the other side:

Earlier this evening, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement in principle.

It is an important step forward that reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone. And, the agreement protects my and Congressional Democrats’ key priorities and legislative accomplishments.

The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want. That’s the responsibility of governing.

And, this agreement is good news for the American people, because it prevents what could have been a catastrophic default and would have led to an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, and millions of jobs lost.

Over the next day, our negotiating teams will finalize legislative text and the agreement will go to the United States House and Senate. I strongly urge both chambers to pass the agreement right away.

On Face the Nation Sunday morning, Minority Leader Jeffries also sounded a cautious, muted tone. He predicted that “there will be Democratic support ... but I’m not going to predict what those numbers may ultimately look like.” Asked about McCarthy’s claim that Jeffries had complained how there was nothing in the bill for Democrats, Jeffries simply shrugged it off. “I have no idea what he’s talking about particularly, because I have not been able to review the actual legislative texts. All that we’ve reached is an agreement in principle,” said Jeffries, not rising to the bait.

The harder they sell, the worse the deal

All the GOP leadership’s strutting and posturing masked a deeper problem: McCarthy and his lieutenants knew that the deal would infuriate the far right. This meant that they would have the most amount of work ahead of them—far more than the Democratic leadership would have to face fending off the left. So McCarthy’s spin coming out the gate had to be strong and partisan in nature. Any bill that didn’t “own the libs” (or at least, one which couldn’t be touted as such) would lose critical support from far-right extremists.

Biden and Jeffries appeared to have understood the assignment and what McCarthy had to do to win his own party’s support. They have stayed relatively quiet about how much of a win the deal truly is for the White House. The GOP had come in with guns blazing, threatening hellfire and deep cuts, and holding the country hostage by risking catastrophic default. But what they wound up with was a nothing burger. 

After all, as Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post observed, 

[T]his much-ballyhooed “deal” doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government.

She further noted,

[T]he most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone. For example, there are no longer sharp cuts to safety-net programs, nor measures to effectively block all agency regulations nor new work requirements for Medicaid. 

But if that’s all true—and it is—why wouldn’t Biden and Jeffries go out and sell these big wins to their own voters? Simply put, they are interested in governing and getting the bill through, and they don’t want to make that task any harder than it already is. To reporters, Biden even revealed a bit of his strategy aloud.

One of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, “Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is? Why won’t Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote?” You think that’s going to help to get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.

The far right seems to understand that they’ve been played and hung out to dry. Once the terms of the deal were clear and in print, many went into open revolt and began to declare their opposition. Railed Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL),

After I heard about the debt ceiling deal, I was a NO.

After reading the debt ceiling deal, I am absolutely NO!!

As I wrote yesterday, Republicans on the right have now called the deal “insanity” and “surrender.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) was furious. “You can’t make this crap up,” he blasted.

Rough waters ahead

McCarthy can only lose four votes from his own party before Democrats need to start to come to his aid to prop it up. It ultimately may require dozens of Democratic votes to pass due to the number of GOP defectors. That will be a humiliating experience, especially after he came out of the talks bragging the Democrats got nothing, implying they absolutely hate the bill. But if that’s the case, why are so many willing to vote for it, while his own party is defecting in droves?

Opposition to the bill from Reps. Roy and Ralph Norman (R-SC) pose a particular problem for McCarthy because both of these “Freedom” Caucus members sit on the powerful House Rules Committee, which will vote today on whether and how the bill gets sent to the floor for a vote on Wednesday. If enough Republicans in that committee vote against the bill, Democrats there will have to join with less extreme Republicans to push it through—which would be seen as a defeat for McCarthy. After all, the Rules Committee is supposed to be the place where the Speaker wields his power. If they try to kill his own deal, that’s a really bad look.

The true test of how good the bill was for the Democrats, and conversely how bad it was for the Republicans, will be in the numbers, assuming the bill gets out of the Rules Committee and receives an up or down vote in the House on Wednesday. It’s at that time we’ll see how well or badly McCarthy and Biden truly played.

One last thing: We often hear that Democrats are “terrible at messaging.” However, they just held off the GOP and fought them to a stalemate where nearly all their important domestic priorities were spared the axe. Yet aren’t they trumpeting that from the top of the Capitol. Terrible messaging right?

To do so would be to undermine what they actually need to get done. This is the hard part about being the party of practical solutions that actually help ordinary people, rather than fill them with emotion and anger. It’s our responsibility as reasonable voters to better understand what’s really going on and take the wins quietly and confidently. We need to see that more subdued messaging from the Democrats, the kind that actually gets the ball across the goal line, in the end is far better than the bluster and braggadocio that fails to move it at all.

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