So, who “won” the debt ceiling standoff? President Barack Obama — for two reasons.

First, the tea party-influenced GOP stopped his job-killing bucket list: higher taxes, more “stimulus,” union card check, and cap and trade, among the items. Whatever the economy does going forward, it will be better than had Obama and the Dems not been whacked. The policies of the last two-and-a-half years — ObamaCare, “stimulus,” bailouts, regulation, “green technology investments,” “quantitative easing” (or as normal people would say, printing money), taxing and threatening to raise taxes further — have failed. The debt-ceiling debate — plus the new Republican majority in the House and the Democrats’ loss of their Senate supermajority — changes the game for the rest of his presidency.