WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The White House and Republicans are competing to shape the first draft of history after an epic battle over the debt, but the next chapter could be critical in deciding who wins the message war.
Now that the threat of a crippling U.S. default has been averted, dueling narratives are in play -- and each side is hoping to gain traction with opinion-makers and voters as the 2012 election race looms.
The risk of keeping this rancorous debate going is that President Barack Obama and Congress, already politically diminished by the long standoff, will suffer further fallout.
But that hasn't stopped either side from working to chronicle its story line in a drama that exposed a deep ideological divide in Washington and has yet to reach the finale.
"This is the age of Twitter when contemporaneous history comes and goes in a nanosecond," said Douglas Brinkley, a political historian and author at Rice University in Houston. "Politicians have only a narrow window to make their case and try to make it stick."
Feeling that sense of urgency, both sides have used everything from mainstream media and news websites to blog posts and Twitter messages to try to win over a public mostly fed up by weeks of acrimony in Washington.
WHO'S WINNING PR WAR SO FAR? NOBODY
Obama's aides maintain that he was the voice of reason, compromising on spending cuts, taking the heat from his liberal Democratic base and finally securing a deal despite Republican intransigence. The door to future tax increases remains open, they insist. But Obama still comes out politically bruised after making steep concessions and getting little in return.
The Republicans depict themselves as champions of deficit reduction who held the line against Obama on taxes rises. But polls show most Americans blame them more than the president for pushing the country to the brink of fiscal disaster.
While the next test will come in the fall when Obama's Democrats and Republicans begin negotiating a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction package, for now neither side is winning the public relations battle.
Polls show that most Americans were disgusted by the legislative spectacle and see all the players less favorably.
And analysts see the dysfunction continuing as Republican Tea Party conservatives -- whose anti-tax orthodoxy laid bare a new political reality in Washington -- become even more emboldened.
"The political food-fight has come out into the open, and this will set the tone for the 2012 campaign," said Tobe Berkovitz, a political communications expert at Boston University.
SPIN CYCLE
Spinning the news is an age-old practice in Washington, but the latest crisis took it to a new level by the time a deal was ratified on Tuesday just hours before the deadline to lift the government's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
Mindful that journalism is essentially the first draft of history, spokespeople for each side waged a nonstop message war as negotiations moved in fits and starts behind closed doors.
Reporters writing play-by-play stories -- known in the news business as "tick-tock" -- were treated to a steady flow of sometimes contradictory leaks from tense meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
Washington was left puzzling one night whether the president -- known for his "no-drama Obama" persona -- had stormed out of a meeting, as a Republican account held, or simply stood up and left after final remarks, as the White House said.
Aides to Obama and the Republican leadership even found themselves sparring via live Twitter feeds -- though always constrained by the service's strict 140-character limit.
While the final chapter of debt drama has yet to be written, the importance of telling a compelling story isn't likely to be lost on Obama or his Republican opponents.
Obama's personal story -- as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya -- helped propel him to the presidency.
Since taking office, he is said to have told scholars meeting him privately that he thinks often about his place in history.
But Obama -- despite being a gifted orator and memoirist -- has looked at times to have lost control of his own narrative. Republicans have gained traction casting him as a tax-and-spend liberal even though he has declared deficit cutting a priority.
Despite that, with a USA Today/Gallup poll showing 46 percent of Americans disapprove of the debt deal and 41 think it will hurt the stumbling economy, it is likely that neither side will score many political points by continuing to dwell on it.
Instead they may see it as more beneficial to change the subject. Obama has already moved to refocus on tackling the nation's 9.1 percent unemployment, an issue considered most critical of all to his 2012 re-election chances.
(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
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