President Obama's decision to agree to a "fiscal cliff" deal that doesn't address the debt ceiling was premised on the thinking that congressional Republicans will not be as successful at holding the economy hostage in the coming months as they were in the summer of 2011. For one thing, the administration believes the business community, and elite opinion more broadly, will be much more vocal than they were last time around in cautioning Republicans against debt-ceiling hijinx.

Is this a fair assumption to make? Well, there are already signs that business leaders will in fact be more outspoken (not difficult, given that they were virtually mute in 2011). “You don’t put the full faith and credit of the United States’ finances at risk,” David M. Cote, chairman of Honeywell and a Republican member of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, told the New York Times yesterday. “The whole idea of using debt ceiling that way or saying ‘I’ll do this horrible thing to all of us unless you give in’ just doesn’t make any sense for anybody. It makes me very nervous. It’s not a smart way to run the country.”

But it's looking as if elite opinion more broadly is more sanguine about another debt-ceiling showdown than the White House had hoped. It is striking to what degree the Washington establishment has come to normalize Republican hostage-taking of the debt limit, to see it as a predictable and almost natural element of the political landscape. Greg Sargent argues convincingly why this is a problem, noting that the debt ceiling must be raised to pay for past spending, and should not be used as a chip in negotiating future budgets: "In the current context, conservatives and Republicans who hold out against a debt limit hike are, in practical terms, only threatening the full faith and credit of the United States — and threatening to damage the economy — in order to get what they want. Any accounts that don’t convey this with total clarity — and convey the sense that this is a normal negotiation — are essentially misleading people. It’s that simple."

What bears stating even more strongly, though, is how far we've come from 2011, when the Washington establishment viewed the Republicans' threat of credit default as as the utterly brazen and unprecedented step that it was. Even those who supported the gambit recognized it as a newly deployed weapon. "While opposition to raising the debt ceiling is common, using the face-off to extract real concessions is less so," conservative economist Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in January 2011.

News reports on the threat of default cast it as a truly risky move: "The debt ceiling debate presents some congressional Republicans with an unhappy choice: A vote to raise the ceiling might expose them to primary challenges in the 2012 election, while a vote against it risks a default on U.S. debt obligations that could jeopardize the fragile economic recovery," wrote Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times that May. As the deadline neared, the tenor of the coverage grew even more ominous: "Georgia Republicans today will help decide whether Washington's unprecedented debate over the federal debt ceiling should be pushed closer to the edge of --- or even beyond --- a potentially dangerous Tuesday deadline," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on July 28. Even after the crisis had passed, official Washington looked on the Republican strategy with a mix of awe and horror -- I was part of a major effort at the Washington Post to reconstruct the year-long tale of how the House GOP came to embrace this previously unthinkable approach.