WSJ-Best of the Web today. Mr. Taranto's right on the mark, as usual.

Fine! Call My Bluff!

Obama maximizes his losses by going all in on a weak hand.

By JAMES TARANTO


Remember a few weeks ago when President Obama reportedly said to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: "Eric, don't call my bluff"? Lots of commentators said that this was a "tell"--that by referring to "my bluff," Obama was admitting he was bluffing.

Actually, his play was even worse than that. A bluff is a pretense. The bluffer knows he has a weak hand but bets as if he has a strong one in order to induce his opponents to fold. Obama had a weak hand but thought he had a strong one. His next words to Cantor, according to Politico, were a vow to "take his case 'to the American people.' " He actually believed--for all we know, he still believes--all that World's Greatest Orator nonsense.

Thus he ended up maximizing his losses. Last weekend congressional leaders appeared to be on the verge of striking a deal, but Obama scuttled their efforts and commandeered the airwaves for a prime-time address. As we predicted, the American people were unmoved.

Obama had looked at his cards and seen that he was holding a 2, a 3, a 4 and a 5. He was sure he had an ace to complete the straight, but in reality he was looking in the mirror. By the time he realized how weak his hand was, there was no time left to improve it or to bluff. Faced with an imminent liquidity crisis--which would have been a political disaster for him as well as an economic one for the country--he was forced to agree to a deal more or less along Republican lines.

From the standpoint of a small-government conservative, the agreement is far from perfect, but it's probably the best possible outcome as long as a left-wing Democrat is in the White House and his party has a Senate majority. One measure of that is the rage it has provoked on the liberal left.

A New York Times editorial calls the deal "a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. . . . This episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest." Haha, remember "civility"?

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman is even huffier: "By demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, [the deal] will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. . . . What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question."

Roars Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect: "The United States has been rendered ungovernable except on the extortionate terms of the far-right. For the first time in modern history, one of the two major parties is in the hands of a faction so extreme that it is willing to destroy the economy if it doesn't get its way. And the Tea Party Republicans have a perfect foil in President Barack Obama."

And, as Roll Call reports, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the Kansas City, Mo., Democrat, said early reports of the new deal appeared to be 'a sugar-coated Satan sandwich.' " Hey, it's better than peas!

It was left to the cynically detached Maureen Dowd, of all people, to say something with a grain of truth:


***** QUOTE *****
Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They've changed the entire discussion. They've neutralized the White House. They've whipped their leadership into submission. They've taken taxes and revenues off the table. They've withered the stock and bond markets. They've made journalists speak to them as though they're John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

Obama and [Speaker] John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the "hobbits," as The Wall Street Journal and John McCain called them.

What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?
***** END QUOTE *****

Dowd is right about the Tea Party's achievement. She is wrong (and thinking wishfully) to suggest that the Tea Partiers and Boehner have a fundamentally adversarial relationship. True, last Thursday they were at cross-purposes over tactics, and it was quite possible that the impasse would end up wrecking the GOP's negotiating position. That it did not is testimony to the effectiveness of Boehner's leadership.

But let's ponder Dowd's interesting speculation that "the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it." Surely this is not a timeless truth. It was not the case in the 1930s or the 1960s. Or even in the 1990s: Bill Clinton's early setbacks notwithstanding, he proved a much more effective political leader than Newt Gingrich.

Times have changed. In the 1930s, government was small. Expanding it massively in order to solve problems might or might not have been a good idea, but there's no denying it was innovative. Today government is sclerotic. Those who believe more government is the solution to America's problems are at best unthinking reactionaries. The Tea Partiers, having clearly identified this problem, are today's true progressives (to employ the term in its literal rather than ideological sense).

They are not, however, "good at government"--or, more precisely, at politics. Their purism cost the GOP as many as three Senate seats last year, and if a competent Democrat were in the White House, it probably would be helping him to re-election right now. The experience of 1995-96 is instructive here. Gingrich had the Tea Party's worst qualities: grandiosity and impatience. He was no match for a president who knew how to play the game.

Today's Republican House has two great strengths that Gingrich's lacked. One is the Tea Party's clarity of purpose. But the other is experienced leadership. Gingrich was highly effective in the minority--an Alinskyite community organizer, if you will, taking on entrenched power by exposing its weakness and corruption. Neither he nor any member of his caucus had ever served in the majority. Between them, Boehner and Cantor alone have 18 years in the majority.

Contrast that to Barack Obama. In addition to a left-liberal ideology that is decades out of date and a Gingrich-size ego, he came to the presidency with virtually no relevant experience. True, he has the "mainstream" media on his side, but that almost certainly hurts him more than it helps. Their flattering but false narratives--he was the "adult in the room," polls clearly showed the American people were on his side--likely encouraged him to mistake his weaknesses for strengths.

There is a danger now that Republicans will fall into the trap of overconfidence. Sarah Palin posted a Facebook note a week and a half ago declaring Obama a "lame duck president." But in the 15 months and five days before he can actually earn that designation, there will be other battles. It is not inconceivable that Obama will fight them more effectively, having learned some lessons from his failure in this one.

Speaking on the House floor Saturday, Politico reports, silly Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi invoked "Star Wars," declaring that Boehner "chose to go to the dark side." The Tea Partiers could do worse than to follow a bit of counsel from that classic movie: "Great, kid. Don't get cocky."