Debt Anger Imperils GOP, Democrats Alike - GOP can be no more confident than Dems that they know the consequences of debt negotiations & outcome.

Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal:

As dark as the political picture is for President Barack Obama right now, Republicans aren't exactly basking in a healthy glow either, suggesting that some wild and unpredictable political forces have been unleashed across the land

The broad cause of the unstable environment is, of course, the economy, which lies in a dazed state, infecting all around it with fear and anxiety. But the more immediate cause of the political system's unhealthy condition is self-inflicted: It was the spectacularly messy debt negotiations that marred the Washington summer.

The debt negotiations were a case of Washington at its worst, a spectacle of prolonged partisan bickering followed by an unsatisfying outcome. That, at least, appears to be how Americans viewed the process, and the depth of their ire, and the consequences of it, are only beginning to be seen for both parties.

Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who conducts The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll along with Democrat Peter Hart, thinks the debt negotiations were more than a passing moment of politically induced indigestion.

He thinks the summer's debt-ceiling wrangling may rank right up there with the Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of financial markets as a defining political moment.

"We are entering a new phase of the American political dialogue that has been irrevocably shifted in a way that will prove difficult to predict," Mr. McInturff wrote in a memo last week. "Historically, though, this type of deep voter anger, unease, and economic pessimism leads to unstable and unpredictable political outcomes."

Republicans can be no more confident than Democrats that they know the precise consequences, and in some respects their vulnerability on this particular front may be greater.

To grasp the importance of the summer's debt negotiations—which produced a plan to cut the federal deficit by at least $2.1 trillion over the next decade just in time to avoid a default by the federal government—look at both how the deal affected Americans' confidence, and how it is judged by them in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

As Mr. McInturff notes, consumer confidence in the wake of the debt deal sunk to its fourth-lowest reading since 1952, as measured by University of Michigan consumer confidence index. Moreover, this drop in confidence wasn't some slow decline, but an immediate plunge clearly related to the debt deal and financial markets' reaction to it.

Between June and August—the stretch run of the debt talks—the Michigan confidence index plunged to 55.7 from 71.5.

That 15.8-point drop matches almost precisely the drop in consumer confidence seen after the Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and is close to the one seen after Hurricane Katrina.

"Make no mistake," Mr. McInturff says, "this collapse of economic confidence is not an independent event driven only by economic reality. This sharp a drop in consumer confidence is a direct consequence of the lack of confidence in our political system and its leaders."

Americans' unhappiness with the debt deal is well illustrated in the new Journal/NBC News poll. Just 23% of those surveyed have a favorable opinion of the deal, and 71% have an unfavorable view of the way negotiations over it were handled.

So, whom do Americans blame? In a nutshell, everybody in Washington. President Obama's approval rating in the new poll drops to 44% the lowest of his term, and the approval rating of Congress drops to 13%, near a historic low. A whopping 82% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.

Here's the particular concern for Republicans, who now control half of that unpopular Congress: When Americans are asked whom they blame for the decision by Standard & Poor's in the wake of the debt deal to lower the federal government's credit rating, twice as many blame Republicans in Congress as blame either President Obama or Democrats in Congress. The debt downgrade was the most immediate real-world impact of the debt deal, and that played badly for the GOP.

Taking the fall for S&P's downgrade would be one thing if Republicans had at least pleased their base with the deal, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

The final debt deal is twice as unpopular among Republicans as among Americans generally, and Republicans take a slightly darker view of the negotiating process than did Democrats.

The point here isn't that Democrats can take much consolation in Republicans' debt-deal concerns. They can't; the fallout from a bad economy almost always hits disproportionately on the party in the White House.

The point is simply that the country is in such a state of economic fear and loathing that the forces being unleashed are spinning off in every direction, with unpredictable consequences.