Aggressive Blunderers

Paul Krugman, NYT

Jonathan Chait argues that blame for what looks more and more like a shutdown merging with a debt ceiling crisis rests not with Tea Party radicals but with the Republican leadership: “The House leadership has evinced every tic of classic aggressive blunderers.”

Unfortunately, I think this is right. Just last week we had Paul Ryan blithely assuring National Review that “nobody believes” that Obama will refuse to make concessions over the debt ceiling, and citing examples from the past that anyone who has actually been following the issue knows have no relevance to what’s happening now.

In other words, GOP leaders fundamentally misjudged the situation (and Obama’s incentives). And now they have backed themselves into a position where they don’t know how to back down — they have to extract concessions or they’ll have been “disrespected,” in a situation where Obama simply can’t make any concessions without destroying his own credibility and betraying the fundamental norms of governance.

So what does the endgame look like?

(More here.)