Why aren't the Democrats rebelling? The debt ceiling negotiations have amounted to a succession of retreats and concessions by President Obama. At this point, the president confronts two possible outcomes in the coming weeks

Option 1 consists of a budget package consisting of six times as much in spending cuts as revenue increases, with most of the latter coming in the form of loophole closures rather than rate increases on the wealthy or the corporate sector. This is a very favorable option for the GOP, but bad for America.

Option 2 is even worse: a full-on failure of negotiations resulting in the federal government's inability to meet its obligations, which in turn would cause immediate massive cuts and economic seizures.

Remember here that the GOP controls only the House of Representatives. The Executive Branch and the Senate are, ostensibly, controlled by Democrats. How did this happen? Frum lays out the gory details, sounding almost like a dirty hippie progressive blogger in so doing:

You can blame his opponents if you want. Yes, the House Republicans have played politics very rough. Not since the era of the Vietnam War has a house of Congress used the threat of national bankruptcy to gain its way on a policy point.

The roughness of the president's opponents does not excuse the president's own mistakes and weakness. But the roughness of the president's opponents does not excuse the president's own mistakes and weakness. On the contrary: from the point of view of the president's supporters, the roughness of the president's opponents makes all the more inexcusable the president's mishandling of the situation. As Marc Ambinder of the National Journal suggested at the time, the president could have included an increase in the debt ceiling in the December deal to extend the Bush tax cuts. The Republicans dearly wanted that extension. Obama did not use leverage when he had it -- and so he became a victim of leverage when he lacked it. Then, as Republicans discovered the power of their new tool, the president decided to assume they were bluffing, that they would never actually do anything so reckless. Waking up to the reality of the situation too late, he commenced bargaining by offering what he assumed would be an irresistible deal. Wrong again. The Republicans did resist. So Obama offered an even better deal -- which predictably only whetted the GOP appetite for still more.

Even the most incompetent negotiator understands the basic principles involved here. And yet an entire political party filled with people who supposedly negotiate on policy for a living appear to have been outwitted and outmatched by a Republican Party using the oldest and negotiating trick on the table: bluffing and threatening to blow everything up if they don't get their way.

Of course, there were things the Obama Administration and Democrats in general could have done. Frum lays out some of the more obvious possibilities:

Obama never publicly branded the debt ceiling as "if the Republicans force this country into bankruptcy." He issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue. He did not warn that he would manage any crisis in ways that Republicans would not like. ("If the Republicans in Congress deny me the authority to pay everybody, then I'm going to have to choose some priorities. I don't think it's likely that Texas-based defense contractors will find themselves at the top of my list.") Instead, he appealed again and again to Republicans' spirit of responsibility. Good luck with that. Talks have now broken down altogether. The crisis is drawing close. And once again Obama is throwing away his leverage.

At this point, absent some remedial efforts to regain negotiating footing already lost, Democrats are forced to either consider 14th amendment remedies to declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional, leading to a full-on GOP head explosion and easy political attacks going into 2012, or capitulate yet again, as they appear to be doing this morning.

As Frum rightly points out:

This shift of topic is pure win-win for the Tea Party. Unperturbed by the risk of national bankruptcy, they can now hurl charges of tyranny and usurpation against the president through 2012, reserving impeachment as a back-up plan should the GOP candidate somehow lose. Some may say: What could a president do faced with such implacable opponents? But the opponents didn't start implacable. Back in January, Speaker John Boehner said the possibility of a government default was "not even on the table." The president's weakness, however, empowered the most radical Republicans. Would one more hard push extract one more big concession? The answer was always, "yes." So the radicals pushed -- and pushed again -- and incidentally pushed would-be dealmakers to the side. Through it all, Obama has played nice, again and again entreating his Republican opponents to emulate his example and play nice too. It's not what Lyndon Johnson would have done. It's not what Franklin Roosevelt would have done.

That even moderate Republicans like Frum are reaching their wits' end with the weakness of Obama's negotiating "tactics" says a great deal about the state of the country and our politics. It's no longer a question whether the priorities of the American people are being heard. Clearly, they are not.

The question is whether there remains any viable political voice in America willing to stand up to the rapacious greed of the financial sector and allied corporate interests. Their gameplan is simple: the economy that is doing so poorly for most regular Americans is doing very well for them. The endgame is to keep this very fruitful economy going, by maintaining their own taxes at historically low levels while plowing funds currently devoted to basic safety net and social services into the Wall St. casino. The only hitch in the plan is the long-term deficit, which scares the bond traders who really control the world economy. Since the deficit would have to be closed either by higher taxes on the economic masters of the universe, or by getting rid of the safety net, obviously the safety net needs to go.

Is there a political organization with the capacity to resist this agenda? It certainly isn't the Democratic Party right now at its highest levels. The Democratic Party led by the Obama Administration has so abdicated even the pretense of standing up to this obvious corporatist program that even moderate Republicans are exasperated at the failure to take a stand.

It has become clear that it is up to the American People now to organize for ourselves.