Jonathan Chait on Boehner: he has "successfully appealed to the GOP's sense of partisanship."

CHAIT ON BOEHNER: Jonathan Chait argues that John Boehner is using partisanship 'to defeat tactical radicalism'.

It seems that Boehner successfully appealed to the GOP's sense of partisanship. Selling a compromise with Obama as a necessary step toward the fulfillment of one's agenda in a power-sharing arrangement is hard. Selling an attack on Obama in those terms -- even one that does far less to reduce the size of government -- turns out to be pretty easy [...] the Boehner plan is totally unsupportable. But once you've gotten the right to cross the philosophic threshold Boehner has, the next step is a lot easier. Boehner will lose plenty of conservatives if and when he cuts a final deal, but he'll gain Democrats. The key step was breaking down the right's default denialism and sense of entitlement to total victory. That's achieved.

And, indeed, it could be argued that Boehner is beginning to look smarter than he initially appeared. "The passage of John Boehner's debt ceiling bill appears to mark the crossing of a certain intellectual threshold for ultra-conservative House Republicans," Chait writes. Exactly.