The winners and losers in Washington’s budget showdown

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

WASHINGTON — Watching the 2011 budget agreement come together six months after its deadline was like trying to read tea leaves in a hurricane. There were no long-term winners in a process that proved how difficult the road to a balanced budget will be.

There were, however, short-term winners and losers. And their actions over the last few days helped shape the contours of a coming debate that will be about trillions of dollars, not mere billions.

Chuck Raasch, Gannett News Service

Winner: The troops and military families. The possibility of soldiers fighting and dying while not being paid was one of the most significant factors that spurred the 11th-hour agreement Friday night.

Loser: Washington. This sausage-making was ugly, and it reminded Americans that their government is still badly divided, and often only able to work in crisis mode. And a fiscal crisis is coming, if not here already. The way this was handled does not inspire much confidence for looming donnybrooks over the 2012 budget and debt-limit ceiling.

Winner: John Boehner and his Republican House caucus. The new speaker of the House was able to stretch Democrats to roughly $39 billion in current-year cuts — far beyond what they originally wanted. It barely tickles the deficit, but it was an important victory because Republicans who run the House have made the debate about how much to cut. Boehner also lowered the budget baseline for next year’s fight, an important and little understood part of this battle because of its multiplying factor over the years. Boehner was able to do something that many of his detractors had doubted he could do: hold together a coalition that includes ambitious individual members with conflicting goals and scores of new Tea Party Republicans who wanted much bigger cuts.

Loser: Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. They held together, yes, but they also gave far more in cuts than they originally intended. Their rhetoric seemed out of proportion to the Republicans’ argument that these cuts were pennies on the dollar compared with the long-term cuts needed. Far more than President Obama and the Republicans, they came across as defenders of a status quo that most Americans say is unsustainable.

Winner: Obama — for now. He could have suffered big political wounds if the government had shut down. By avoiding that, he misses deeper criticism that he had not led forcefully enough in this budget debate, and the economy was spared the damage he had feared from a shutdown. But this battle shifted the early 2012 presidential focus to the deficit, which remains at record levels under his presidency.

Loser: Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic leader has become a legislative irrelevancy, even as her Democrats try to devise a strategy to take back the House in 2012. On Friday, as negotiators were crunching the final numbers, she was at a forum at Tufts University in Boston about her legacy as the first female speaker of the House. Republicans pointed out that her legacy included not passing a 2011 budget.

Winner and loser: The Tea Party. Democrats tried to demonize the movement, but it is far more disparate — and conflicted — than most people understand. It is united by one goal, however: cutting government. On that measure, it came out a winner in this early budget skirmish, even if its more prominent activists are grumbling that more cuts were necessary. But its success has come with a price. Polls also show that more Americans are wary of the Tea Party as a force in politics than were before last year’s elections. And some Tea Party supporters’ “my way or the highway” approach could be a problem for Boehner and the GOP going forward.