Dangerously disinformed diaries about the debt abound, together with a few sane voices in the wilderness. Most of the things that need to be said have already been said, and many things that better would have been left unspoken, have also been said. I want mainly to elaborate one thought here, which has not got much play so far, as far as I have read. It is not about the content of the deal (for that I refer to this), but about the power play involved.
What does this debt deal do to the teabaggers?
They have voted against it. In other words, they lost this vote, and it was not even close. Boehner, Cantor and McConnell have sided with Non-Republicans to get something done. The 'moderate' Republicans have worked with Democrats to get something done. The optics of this is important.
Obama and the Dems managed to show a rift (or more accurately to produce a rift) in the Republican party. Of course, at the same time the divergent tendencies of the Dems became obvious, but that was no news. Nobody ever mistook the Dems for a monolithic force.
So far the teabaggers have had the rest of the Republicans running scared. Now they have not been on the winning side. There should be resentment brewing. I think that this is a very nice side-effect of Obamas negotiating strategy. We can still hope that the teabaggers find their Nader. Some of them must have gotten the impression that Washington screws everybody and that they need to challenge the corrupt two party system.
Of course it would be completely inappropriate to go over to their web sites and actually vent such frustration and push for a third party challenge:-)