The deficit-reduction deal that finally raised America's debt ceiling and staved off the threat of default seemed to make no one happy. "A sugar-coated Satan sandwich," one Democratic congressman called it. Republican candidates for president lined up to denounce it.But even less popular than the deal itself was the process that led up to it: months of partisan wrangling, broken deals and brinkmanship, with the threat of default hanging over an economy struggling to grow. "Our economy didn't need Washington to come along with a manufactured crisis to make things worse," Ba-rack Obama noted as he signed the deal into law on August 2nd-the day the Treasury had warned that it would run out of cash to meet its obligations.
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