Crisis becomes a drama for Obama

President Barack Obama last week finally lost his cool, we are told. A leader so unflappable that his staff long ago nicknamed him "No Drama" Obama walked out of a meeting with Republicans on reducing America's stifling debt.

It is all relative — there were no raised voices or foul language — and this was the fourth two-hour meeting with the opposition in as many days to end inconclusively. But clearly the president was piqued.

His aides skilfully exploited the rift, releasing to reporters snatches of manly verbiage from a president who is often derided as being too professorial.

"Eric, don't call my bluff," he told Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, who wouldn't budge on his opposition to raising taxes of any kind.

"This may bring my presidency down but I will not yield on this," he is said to have declared. What a pity we didn't hear such tough talk at his press conference on Friday. He did offer one good line, declaring that the United States was "not Greece or Portugal".

Obama and his aides are fond of presenting him as the "only grown-up in the room" — the disinterested, above-the-fray adult who could bring the unruly children of Congress to order if only they would listen to common sense. It must be said that in the case of contemporary Republicans, the White House does have a point about a lack of coherence.

There are many in the party — mainly from the Tea Party contingent — who think it won't matter if Congress doesn't agree to raise the federal government's borrowing limit by August 2, the issue that started the current ruckus.

It is a matter of mathematics, not conjecture, that if the US does not borrow more money, it will be approximately $134 billion short next month and will have to choose between not paying its creditors, chiefly the Chinese, or closing courts, highways, police stations and so on.

Default would of course create a crisis of confidence in the still brittle world economy that could plunge us all into recession again. Some Republicans get this. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee questioned whether the party should ever have made spending cuts a condition of its agreement to raise the debt ceiling.

Wary of handing Obama a political coup, Senator John McCain advised Cantor and Speaker John Boehner to "get one of our highly respected Republican pollsters to come over and brief them".

"Right now, we're not winning the battle" of public opinion, he said. Republican intransigence on any type of revenue increase — they oppose not only higher tax rates, but any changes to tax breaks and credits for the wealthy and corporations — is moreover not supported by the public.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2011