Topic A: Who won and lost in the debt deal?

The contrast with today’s debt standoff is stark. President Obama’s numbers have been falling and so have the ratings of Republicans in Congress, both to record lows as the public took away a message of gridlock politics as usual.

Republicans found that they could not pass a deal on their own; Democrats learned that they could not pass a deal on their own; both sides learned rather painfully that bipartisan compromise was the only way to avoid financial calamity.

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 Collection of cartoons on the federal budget and economy.

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Congressional leaders agree on an unappetizing debt-limit deal.

The eleventh-hour deal has a Round II that gives the president another opportunity to get this right from the start — by setting out core values around the right way to trim the size of government.

If both sides have learned anything, they will approach the second step in fundamentally different ways — with less drama and more consistency — or they will fall into the same traps and wind up losers rather than winners.

MAYA MACGUINEAS

President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and director of the fiscal policy program at the New America Foundation

Well, at least we didn’t default. That’s probably the best thing to say about the proposed debt deal. But the question is: If this wasn’t the moment to put in place the framework for a real debt deal to fix the problem, when will we? The Bowles-Simpson commission laid out a plan to save $4 trillion and stabilize the debt. The Senate Gang of Six worked out several proposals to move such an idea forward. And the Boehner-Obama discussions were on the right track, covering further health-care savings and an overhaul of the tax system.

In the end, however, we’re going with the plan that doesn’t save nearly enough, that doesn’t require the critical issues of entitlement and tax reform to be centerpieces of the deal, and that relies on a trigger (which doesn’t even kick in until after the 2012 election) with about as many teeth as a 6-month-old.

But all hope is not lost. Let’s hope the members of the super-committee are lawmakers who have sincere interest in addressing our fiscal challenges and a willingness to work across the aisle. Markets and outside institutions such as the Fed, the International Monetary Fund and the credit rating agencies are likely to maintain the pressure to do something real. It is conceivable that this committee could go for the brass ring, exceeding its mandate and expectations. If it does, we still have a chance to fix our fiscal problems with a package that can preserve the key priorities of both parties: pro-growth tax policies and protection of public investments and those who depend on government programs. If the committee doesn’t, this task will only get harder over time.

MIKE LUX

Democratic political strategist; special assistant to the president for public liaison from 1993 to 1995; author of “The Progressive Revolution: How America Came to Be”

When President Obama agreed to negotiate with Republicans on tying a deficit-cutting deal to the default deadline, rather than pushing harder to raise the debt limit last year or demanding from the beginning a clean bill to do so, something like the deal we have today was probably inevitable. Republicans were never going to agree to tax increases for the wealthy or big corporations, and so we have more deep cuts in programs that help the middle class with nothing in return from Republicans or their wealthy patrons. Now, this deal could have been quite a bit worse, — Social Security is so far unharmed, the military budget faces some cuts, and so forth — but going to the “middle” when the other side is starting so far on the extreme will never give you a good result.