There may be few clear winners from the debt-ceiling deal struck this weekend between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, but there is certainly one clear loser, Boston University history professor Thomas Whalen tells the Boston Herald.  Whalen says that Barack Obama has no way of declaring any kind of political victory from this deal — and that it all but guarantees a primary challenge from the Left:

Boston University political history professor Thomas Whalen predicted he’s lost friends on his own side with a compromise with Republicans that “probably guarantees some kind of liberal opponent to President Obama in 2012,” he said.

“I think there are a lot of ticked-off people on the Democratic side here, because President Obama, he’s basically giving (the GOP) 80 percent of what they want. I don’t see how he can declare some kind of political victory here.”

There is no doubt about who lost this fight.  While Republicans had to eventually agree to a massive debt-ceiling increase, they kept new taxes off the table, the one demand that Obama made publicly and repeatedly throughout the entire impasse.  Obama got his wish in a credit limit that will take him through the next election, but now has to order the second installment himself, with a mechanism that allows Republicans to register their disapproval painlessly.

Furthermore, the process itself damaged Obama most.  Instead of demonstrating leadership by putting his own plan on the table, at times Obama appeared to be lost amidst the changing parameters of the debate.  Harry Reid publicly acknowledged that new taxes would be off the table more than a week before the deal, but Obama kept demanding them publicly almost up to the moment that he agreed to a package without them.  In the end, he had to outsource the negotiations to his VP, the Herald reports:

Obama struggled through weeks of clashes. He pressed for tax increases with spending cuts but did not prevail. When Republicans walked out of White House talks, saying they could not negotiate with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden stepped in.

“The perception is that the president has abrogated leadership,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Political analyst Larry Sabato notes that the Republicans “got the worst end of the coverage and the better end of the deal,” and that Democrats are much less happy about the deal than the GOP.  It’s that unhappiness, especially among progressives, that convinces Whalen that Obama will face a primary challenge from the Left.

But is that realistic?  First, the hour is rather late for a primary challenger.  Obama has already raised $47 million last quarter, and Generic Primary Challenger has raised … zero.  No one of consequence has even hinted at a primary challenge to Obama, let alone start the organizing process.  Anyone wanting to mount a serious challenge to Obama would have needed to start months ago, or have a big enough name to make a late start irrelevant.  The only one with the latter quality in the Democratic Party is Hillary Clinton, and she hardly qualifies as a candidate to the left of Obama.

There are a couple of nationally-known progressives who might fit the bill.  Russ Feingold probably makes the most sense, but there are two definite problems with Feingold.  First, he lost his last election in Wisconsin, and lost it big, which is why he’s sitting on the sidelines now.  Feingold probably wouldn’t carry his home state in a national election, and probably wouldn’t in a primary fight, either.  Second, Obama did a lot of campaigning for Feingold in that election (which may have contributed to his defeat), and Feingold’s not likely to repay Obama by undermining him in a primary fight this time around.  The only other names that spring to mind are Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Senator Bernie Sanders, who have as much chance of scoring an upset against Obama in 2012 as Kucinich had in 2008.

Obama’s problem with the Left won’t be a primary challenger.  It will be the loss of support in the general election.  Right now, his base is all he has left from the coalition that made him President in 2008; independents and working-class Democrats have begun to flee.  This deal (and Obama’s performance during the impasse) won’t bring those voters back, and his source of organization and funding may largely give up on him.