Yesterday morning, Mitch McConnell gave away a key tell when he said he had a contingency plan to ensure the debt ceiling gets lifted. Today he showed his hand and it's a fold. The plan announced by McConnell today is highly, and intentionally, convoluted, but the details don't really matter. The essence of it is to abandon efforts to force policy concessions in return for lifting the debt ceiling, and instead set up a bunch of show votes to embarrass the Democrats. In other words, it's a reversion to the old status quo, before President Obama and the Congressional Republicans turned the debt ceiling vote into a high stakes hostage crisis.

We don't know how this gambit will turn out. John Boehner's spokesman is definitely not ruling it out. At the very least, McConnell's capitulation will pressure House Republicans into going along. They may refuse. But assuming this winds up being the mechanism to increase the debt ceiling, it's a staggering turnaround.

If you told me last week that we might get a debt ceiling hike without Obama making policy concessions to Republicans, I wouldn't have believed you. What happened since then? Well, Obama called the Republicans' bluff. He turned the debate from a generalized question of cutting spending, where the public sides with Republicans, into a debate over specific policy priorities, where the public overwhelmingly supports the Democrats. Most people want a balanced package of revenue increases and spending cuts, in contradiction to the GOP's all-cuts-or-die stance. The public strongly favors higher taxes on the rich and strongly opposes entitlement cuts. Obama smoked out the GOP's actual policy choices. And he smoked out the Republicans' refusal to compromise on its unpopular priorities, establishing himself as the one party who was willing to make the kind of compromise that was the only plausible avenue to deficit reduction.

More recently, Obama said that if the debt ceiling is not lifted, he won't be able to send out Social Security checks. Imagine how that one would play out for Republicans. In general, he demonstrated yet again that it's very hard for Congress to win a public relations fight against the president. Meanwhile, the business lobby was no doubt pushing hard behind the scenes, and the business lobby usually wins.