Mr. Putin, Exceptionalize This! -- by C. Smith and J. Ross

A few weeks back, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Americans it was wrong to claim we are “exceptional.”  Not only does that go against Creator-endowed equality, Mr. Putin said, but Exceptionalism is “dangerous.”  

Perhaps Putin envies America’s place in the world. However, if the brinksmanship and stalemate in Washington, with Texas’ Ted Cruz at the helm, play out as it looks they might, Putin will soon have much to envy about “Exceptionalist” America.

Who else but the United States would dare default on its debt and drive the entire global economic machine into meltdown?  Russia? Nyet!   France?  Zut alors!  Germany?  Nein.  China?  No way.  Only the Great and Powerful U-S-A.

What could be more Exceptional, more unprecedented, individualistic, and American than to stall for the cameras, Green-Eggs-and-Ham style, while the stock market and global economy wait as prey?  While 1/100th of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body publicly dreamt of stuffing himself with White Castle sliders while sipping from the tarnished cup of the Tea Party, we have slid toward the abyss of political impotence and financial destruction.

To “low-information” voters who admire Senator Cruz for stalling his own party’s legislation, crippling the Constitutional requirement that our government back its financial obligations is apparently no big deal.  “Full Faith and Credit” could be a way to fund a megachurch, for all they care.  To Cruz, the point of a 21-hour soliloquy was not legislative success or truth-telling; his goal may have been the propagation of his own myth – and collecting signatures on useless petitions, ready to transpose those names to checks for his inevitable train wreck of a presidential campaign.

For more than 200 years, the United States has built itself into an Indisputably Indispensable Power - the “Shining City on a Hill.”  The current yip-and-yap may foretell the swagger with which the US will walk soon when it deposits its Exceptionalism in the bank (or debtor’s prison).  If the Treasury is right, October 17 is the last day we may borrow to pay off Congressionally-mandated spending, making the countdown to the most exceptional proof of our Exceptionalism a ticking bomb.  Even the most hawkish neoconservatives and Cold Warriors never imagined the Domino Effect this unprecedented American influence may have:  to bring to their collective knees the world's financial markets and economy in a crumbling catatonic heap.

Only the United States, in its truly unique and Exceptionalist fashion, may risk pulling the proverbial plug on the catatonic patient, the global economy.  The phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" might be apt, if only it acknowledged the cacophonous scratching of Cruz’s violin.  Who will pull the plug, inducing global chaos?  Will it be the silver-tongued Nobel Laureate, he of Obamacare?  Will it be the lost-shepherd, Speaker Boehner?  No.  It must be, it can be, the Grinch Who Stole Washington, the Texan who has proven he will talk all day, in the rain, on a plane, on a boat, or with a goat (as long as the goat writes a check), livestreaming his rhetoric to drive the news cycle.

Senator Cruz’s “I do not like the Obama-plan, I do not like it, Ted-I-am” bluster plays to the Far Right, but is fodder for the ever-self-proclaimed Always Right, whose puppeteered control of the GOP appreciates daily (regardless of pushback by Karl Rove and other Republicans In Name Only – the McCains, Grahams, and Corkers).  To both the Far Right and the Always Right, this week may be historic for unveiling another rhetorical superhero:  a cartoonish ideologue in a suit and imagined cape, as Exceptional a demagogue as we’ve ever seen.  Though Cruz’s marathon bombast won recognition, the forthcoming default might leave little capital for his roadshow to take to the international circuit.

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Cruz’s all-night non-filibuster was anything but heroic.  It was, however, cartoonish.  Ronald Reagan, the conservative superhero who raised the debt ceiling on average every six months during a Presidency in which he tripled the deficit, knew how to compromise and see the big picture.  “I’m not worried about the deficit.  It is big enough to take care of itself,” he famously said, even as he castigated Democrats for delaying more than one of those 18 debt-ceiling increases while working out deals to keep the government running.

If only Mr. Cruz – like the Patron Saint of Conservatism Reagan – knew the difference between an exceptional clown and an Exceptionalist superhero.

Mr. Christopher Smith and Mr. Jon Ross are college instructors and writers in Vermont and Illinois respectively.