“We’ve got a lot of things going for us,” President Obama said at a press conference Tuesday. The economy was looking up; people were working, oil was flowing, life would be not so bad but for the “uncertainty caused by just one week of this nonsense.” Nonsense was one of the kinder words he had for the government shutdown—“We can’t make extortion routine”—and the possibility that Congress would let the United States default on its debts, about nine days from now. He called that an “economic shutdown.”

Obama kept asking people “just to boil this down to personal examples.” In their own lives, if they weren’t happy, they “don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their jobs,” or decide not to pay bills out of grumpiness. They “wouldn’t deal with co-workers or business associates in this manner.” Just as “you’re not saving money by not paying your mortgage; you’re just a deadbeat,” refusing to raise the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on the amount Congress can borrow to pay its bills, would not make those bills go away. “What’s true for individuals is also true for nations, even the most powerful nation on earth.”

The national economy as household economy is usually one of the more spurious political-economic arguments. Countries aren’t actually like individuals. Their business and long-term investment priorities, vulnerabilities and basic morality, are too disparate, as are the exigencies around borrowing—or they should be. What is remarkable, and depressing, about a default is that the metaphors about creditors calling and bills stacking up would be descriptions of unfolding events. The United States of America really would become just some guy—that guy you know who has problems with money.

When Julianna Goldman, of Bloomberg, asked Obama if, as we got near the statutory debt ceiling, he might pay interest on bonds while skipping, say, Social Security checks, “to maintain the semblance of credit,” he said he didn’t think that he could fool the markets that way, or with some other legalistic move like “roll[ing] out a big coin.” (Presumably a platinum one.) What “the people who are buying treasury bills think” would count, and they’d know it was still the U.S. that wasn’t paying people, and not someone else who happened to live at the same address, and they would punish us, even without a technical default:

If you’ve got a mortgage, a car note, and a student loan that you have to pay, and you say, well, I’m going to make sure I pay my mortgage, but I’m not going to pay my student loan or my car note, that’s still going to have an impact on your credit. Everybody’s still going to look at that and say, “You know what? I’m not sure this person is that trustworthy.” And at minimum, presumably, they’re going to charge a higher interest rate.

Default strips the shininess of sovereignty—“That’s what would happen to you if you made those decisions; well, the same is true for the federal government.” The United States wouldn’t be anything special. The debt-ceiling breach scares people in a way that furloughing federal workers, as bad as it is, does not. That has been a perverse source of comfort: one mainstream view is that the prospect is not alarming at all, because no one of either party would let something so bad happen.

Wouldn’t they? An attitude that Obama described as “let’s take default out for a spin and see how it rides” may be taking hold among the G.O.P.’s nihilists. (Nicholas Thompson has a look at some Cold War nuclear game-theory tactics that may now come into play.) Some are counting on the move Goldman described—just make the most urgent interest payments, and treat the rest as a larger-scale shutdown—and are trying to pass a bill to require it. Others just don’t mind tearing it all down.

What everyone is counting on is that the Republican Party is more mercenary than it is mad—that it is beholden to Wall Street and big business in a way that might, for once, be useful to the American people. Maybe it is. Obama spent a good amount of time in his press conference mocking the G.O.P. for things like holding up drilling permits. Will that give him more leverage than the loss of money for nutritional help for newborns and death benefits for soldiers’ families? The Republican answer is that they are willing to pass miniature spending bills for whatever gets the most headlines, but there are so many of those that the “mini-C.R.” war looks like a paper-airplane battle—distracting, but not decisive.

Obama talked and then answered reporters’ questions for more than an hour. He has the political space to do so, because of how empty the House Republicans agenda is right now. Speaker of the House John Boehner came out for just a few minutes, to mutter about the need for “conversation” before slipping away. He looked like he hoped that no one would notice that he was just trying to fill time. Boehner’s public appearances have served mostly to show off his ability to keep a straight face when he says, for example, that there aren’t enough votes in the House for the temporary spending bill the Senate has already passed. The votes are plainly there; they’ve been counted. And the bill, which would reopen the government, already reflects significant Democratic compromises. Maybe it’s time to have a conversation about that—and a straight up-or-down vote.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.