KEITH HENNESSEY: The debt limit threat was undesirable, necessary, and effective.

Congressional Republicans’ legislative tactic created temporary liquidity risk that is now gone. That threat was undesirable but unavoidable, given their policy goal and the inaction of other policymakers.

The U.S. economy was weak before the debt limit battle, throughout that battle, and still is weak today. The past few months’ legislative tactics did not cause March’s big drop in consumer confidence. These tactics did not cause U.S. GDP to grow by only 0.4% in the first quarter of this year.

The increased liquidity risk that resulted from those tactics was resolved last Tuesday when the President signed the new law. Problems in Europe, S&P’s downgrade and future solvency risk, and fears of a double-dip recession are better explanations for current market turmoil, not fear of liquidity risk that was eliminated six days ago.

The President is trying to attribute everything bad in the economy and financial markets to a temporary legislative tactic of the opposing party. While this is politically clever, I cannot see how he can back up this claim. Does the President think that 8-12 weeks of fear of a possible bad outcome that came not to pass caused “enormous damage to our economy and the world’s?”

At this point, he’ll try anything. Plus this:

I disagree with the President when he says “the gridlock in Washington over the last several months has not been constructive.” That at times raucous battle resulted in a new law that promises to cut government spending and deficits by $2.1 T over the next decade. That battle resulted in a negotiating structure and a fallback sequester to achieve at least another $1.2 T of deficit reduction. That battle resulted in a negotiated list of hundreds of billions of dollars of additional entitlement spending cuts that I presume will form the foundation of that second stage process. That battle resulted in the President sticking his fiscal toe in the water on Medicare spending and CPI. That battle caused the President to start talking positively about the Bowles-Simpson recommendations that he had previously ignored.

These results are big for Washington but small relative to the remaining underlying problem left to be solved. Had everyone gone along quietly and politely with a clean debt limit increase, even this limited progress would be absent.

If we had a better political class, the threat wouldn’t have been needed. But if we had a better political class, we wouldn’t be in this fix.