THE DEBT DEAL AND THE AGONY OF NANCY PELOSI

The agony of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, is palpable these days. When she speaks on the House floor, she waves her arms and talks with great passion. She has the look of a politician in torment.

The cause of her distress is the change this year in the political culture of Capitol Hill. Congress has traditionally been dominated by the impulse to spend more and more of the public’s money. In 2011, and especially in the Republican-controlled House, that has been replaced by a culture of spending cuts.

Republicans are thrilled by the change, since it fits their ideology and agenda. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl says it’s “the best” climate for cutting spending he’s experienced since coming to Congress in 1986. But Democrats have found adjusting to the change to be difficult, if not impossible. Some, like Ms. Pelosi, appear disoriented and distraught.

In the days before Tuesday’s passage of an increase in the debt limit, Ms. Pelosi was melodramatic in her attacks on the cuts in domestic spending that Republicans attached to the debt measure. Her comment that Democrats were trying “to save life on this planet as we know it” was widely reported.

But Ms. Pelosi said a lot more. She suggested the Founding Fathers would have opposed the cuts. “We owe it to honor the sacrifice of the Founders” to reject the cuts, she declared. Not only that, but she asserted it was unconstitutional for Republicans to raise the possibility of defaulting on the debt payments.

As for House Speaker John Boehner, “he chose to go to the dark side,” Ms. Pelosi said. She added that Republicans are “destroying the public space of clean air, clean water, food safety, the education of our children, the health, financial security of our seniors through Medicare and Medicaid.”

Listening to Ms. Pelosi, one might conclude she’s never seen a cut in domestic spending she liked. She’s hardly alone. When Mr. Boehner’s debt-ceiling bill was debated in the House this past Sunday, Democrats focused on programs they claimed to be protecting from Republican cuts. They scarcely mentioned any cuts they approved of.

President Obama does the same. When he signed the compromise debt bill, he was quick to note it “allows us to keep making key investments in things like education and research that lead to new jobs.” He stressed that spending cuts only go so far. “You can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts,” he said.

Republicans believe you can. The deep cuts in their “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation are projected to wipe out the deficit within 10 years. That legislation, which also calls for a balanced budget amendment, passed the House but was ignored by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Democrats carried their aversion to spending cuts into the closed-door negotiations, first led by Vice President Biden, then by Mr. Obama. They minimized the need for net reductions. Instead, they repeatedly argued to use money cut from one program to spend on another.

There was bipartisan agreement on reforming the student loan program. That saved $22 billion, $17 billion of which was used to fund a shortfall in Pell Grants for college students. Both sides favored picking up $22 billion from “spectrum auctions”—i.e., auctioning off government licenses for the commercial use of wireless spectrum—but Democrats sought to spend $11 billion of it. In the end, spectrum savings didn’t make it into the final bill.

Cutting Medicare benefits, including co-payments and deductibles, was ruled out by Democrats. Only payments to providers could be cut, and Democrats proposed to use that money to fund the annual “doc fix” to keep Medicare fees for doctors from being slashed. This shift in payments, with no deficit reduction, was rejected by Republicans.

Little progress was made in the category of “waste, fraud and abuse.” Republicans wanted to go after $100 billion in Medicare overpayments. They got nowhere. When they tried to eliminate loopholes in the food-stamp program to save $17 billion, they had to settle for $2 billion.

The negotiations were the inside game. Outside the talks, Democrats castigated Republicans and the tea party for exploiting the debt limit to get spending cuts. Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas insinuated that Republicans were pressuring Mr. Obama because of his race.

According to Politico, Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania accused Republicans of being terrorists. “We have negotiated with terrorists,” he said. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” Friendly journalists joined in. Columnist Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote: “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.”

The American people don’t think so. In a Rasmussen poll at the end of July, at the height of the debt debate, Republicans were preferred over Democrats in congressional races 43% to 39%. And a CNN poll released Tuesday found that only 15% of Americans felt the cuts in the debt-limit bill had “gone too far.”

Republicans, seemingly oblivious to the attacks, are undeterred. They pushed through three stopgap spending bills with cuts attached. In the House, they passed a budget with $6.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years. They approved “Cut, Cap and Balance” and voted for Mr. Boehner’s plan, which was the basis of the compromise debt-limit bill with $917 billion in cuts signed by the president on Tuesday.

“We’re on the offensive right now,” says Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, one of the 87 Republican freshmen. “We’re winning. We’ve got a great message.”

But will the new culture of spending cuts endure? “We’ve got this moment right now,” says Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. “If we lose the moment, the country’s trajectory will be forever altered, and not in the right direction.”

Mr. Ryan is convinced the moment will last. “There’s been a sea change,” he says, evident since the tea party revolt and the 2010 election. In the 1990s, the Republican drive for spending cuts faded. “The problem was so much smaller then,” Mr. Ryan says. “The foundation of our economy is at risk now.” The Republican plan is to stay “on course,” says Mr. Womack. All of which means Ms. Pelosi’s suffering isn’t likely to end soon.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.