Yet Another Mitch Switch

While I blew a bit of a gasket over Obama's trial balloon last weekend to weaken the financial reform bill, it seems that the predictable GOP response of "It's a start, now you will meet the rest of our demands completely, THEN we'll talk" isn't going over well with the public at all.  In fact, it's going badly enough for the Republicans that even Mitch McConnell is eagerly talking about a forthcoming deal:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a markedly different tone on financial regulatory reform today, suggesting an agreement could be struck with Democrats sooner rather than later. And Democrats have taken notice.

"We believe the process to achieve [a bipartisan bill] has now been reconstituted," McConnell told reporters after the Republicans' weekly caucus meeting this afternoon. "We are all confident that this can be fixed... Senator Shelby [the Republicans' chief financial reform negotiator] believes that there's been a very serious effort to re-engage."

Seems the optics on this are really, really bad for the GOP here...bad enough to make Mitch here do a total 180 from Friday's "Send it back to the drawing board" rhetoric.  It's not helping that Goldman Sachs is acting like a bunch of petulant jagoffs that seemed truly shocked that any politician would dare to lay a glove on them, and the effort to tie Goldman Sachs to the Democrats as a donor is just bringing up the number of Republicans who got donations from the firm too, and pointing out how it was the Democrats on the SEC's commission that voted to bring the suit and the Republicans who said no, defending the firm.

The internal numbers that the Republicans are getting off this must be shockingly bad for Mitch McConnell to talk about a close deal at hand now in less than 36 hours after saying that entire bill had to be scrapped.

Democrats still plan to bring this bill to the floor this week, so we'll see how this goes.  Obama may have blinked first, but it's the GOP who laid their cards face down on the table as a result.