Misreading The Mood
This is a misreading of history and of current politics. Bush's measly 37 percent of the vote in 1992 was the result of factors far beyond taxes. (Ross Perot, who won an astonishing 19 percent of the vote as an independent, harped on deficits, not the broken tax pledge.) And if today's Republicans agree to a historic deal that cuts $4 trillion from the budget, it's hard to imagine that many would be successfully challenged in primaries by Tea Party activists, most of whom say they care more about deficits than taxes anyway.
As the clock ticks down, some variation on the Walker formula seems the best hope for averting another financial fiasco. Obama and Boehner can do what the president (played by Henry Fonda) couldn't manage in the movie -- save the day with a "Fail-Safe" device.
(Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)