MONTREAL -- So far as performances go, America is bombing, even in a city like Montreal, where, in the heat of the summer, things are quite chill and composed.

Some of the busiest streets downtown are closed because Montreal hosts a comedy festival each summer. And no one honks their horns.

But all the talk among American visitors is about fear and the decline of their country. And that's just from the American comedians. (At his Juste Pour Rire performance, Greg Proops got huge laughs when he noted that, for this particular gig, he's OK with being paid in loonies, not in American dollars, for once).

The comedians also made fun of America's tendency to make lists of winners and losers.

Here it doesn't really matter who won or lost. The Daily Show's John Oliver urged America to spend another $3 trillion because, really, what's the difference between $14.3 trillion and any other number? American political leaders pretended that all they had was a little spat and that everyone has come together and is sharing in a triumphal agreement to... well, we'll find out when a commission tells us down the road.

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And sometimes there aren't any obvious winners or losers. You can make the case that President Obama got what he needed -- the chance to fight another day for his political priorities. Unfortunately, he'll be able to do so only if he is reelected.

It's a big if. Obama was left with no leverage in this fight, other than the potential threat of a default weighing on the minds of more responsible Republicans. He warned that Republicans wouldn't give him an inch, because that's not what Republicans do, and that's certainly not what they were elected in 2010 to do.

He didn't build a strong personal relationship with Speaker John Boehner until the mating season was almost finished. How could Obama assume Republicans would act like adults with him while he refused to build the type of bond he'd need with Boehner to make it count if they did?

Obama assumed the economy would be better -- better to the point where spending would no longer drive the political narrative. But the economy remains distressingly sluggish. And the markets, it turned out, weren't nearly as helpful to Obama as he might have thought they would be. Not the bond markets. Not the "Asian markets," which kind of knew that their debtors wouldn't dare default. Not the stock market. (A few days of decline in some indices does not a threat make.)

Boehner is widely regarded as a loser. But that's like expecting the new principal of a school full of misfits to bring in the highest test scores. Boehner knew what he had ahead of him when he took the job -- a determined freshman class that wouldn't follow his rules, only its principles -- and he did what he could. He got the best deal he could have gotten given that Republicans control one half of Congress. If you put yourself in the shoes of Republicans circa 2008 and ask them whether they'd take this deal, they'd accuse you of being ridiculously naïve and optimistic.

Mitch McConnell acted like Mitch McConnell. The House Republicans do not butter his bread and never did, and expecting him to act like them was unreasonable. He is a smart guy. It is not surprising he saw the endgame first.

In private, Obama's advisers talk about bringing the Democrats in from the cold, realigning their policy proprieties to fit their demographic base and the realities of modern politics. It used to be that voters really didn't care about spending -- they only said they did. It was an accepted way of railing against some messy social policy, usually.

But since the government charged two wars on credit, the housing market went bust, and the banks were bailed out -- to the people who vote, spending really started to mean something.

Obama's (reelection) base has to like the deal, and the president will spend a lot of time patiently explaining to his party why its economic platform suddenly seems a lot more Republican than it used to.

Americans like to say that our democratic experiment is messy but better than any other system ever conceived. As American stand-up comedian Colin Quinn sees it, the worst system ever conceived is a dictatorship. There, you get one choice. In America, you get two choices. So the best system ever conceived is the worst system -- plus one?

That's a humorist's license and even trite; in the past, those two choices have been sufficiently malleable to account for broad ideological coalitions that fit whatever divided America at the time.

But today, those two choices seem like the worst political system ever conceived -- plus one. Not just to the world. But to Americans, too.

At least when they're outside the country.