October 7th, 2013
Erick Erickson has gauged the dynamics of the CR/shutdown fight and the looming debt ceiling fight pretty much perfectly, I think:
Republicans are winning the shutdown fight, and Democrats know it.
People turning on the news this week came away with the knowledge that it was about Obamacare and kept hearing that Democrats wouldn’t negotiate. They also learned that for some reason the President didn’t want Word War II veterans to tour their own memorial, and Harry Reid won’t turn the funding on for cancer clinical trials at the NIH. Oh, and the rollout for Obamacare is one big glitch.
Late yesterday came word that the Amber Alert system has been shut down, but Barack Obama’s federally funded golf course remains open. Catholics are openly fretting that priests on military bases could get arrested for performing mass — at the very least they are prohibited from doing so. . . .
So the question is do we want to stop Obamacare or do we want to stop the debt ceiling increase? My view is that we cannot do both at the same time. We might dare to dream, but the debt ceiling will be increased one way or the other.
Right now the GOP is holding up very well in the press and public opinion because it is clear they want negotiations. The GOP keeps passing legislation to fund departments of government. It has put the Democrats in an awkward position.
But the moment the GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, we are going to have problems. . . .
I think somebody like Steve Scalise, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, needs to propose a short-term debt limit for a few weeks and attach to it the Full Faith and Credit Act that ensures the Treasury Department prioritizes interest payments in the event the debt limit is ever not increased. This would buy us some time to finish the fight to defund Obamacare and set us up well to fight the next long-term debt limit increase to the death by removing some of the President’s scare tactics. How do Republican Leaders not adopt and push such a proposal? How does Obama not accept it without looking completely unreasonable?
To my eye, this is very shrewd. Republicans wanted a shutdown less than Democrats (or at least less than Harry Reid and Obama) did. But, as it turned out, the politics of the shutdown were unpredictable. They haven’t been particularly good for Obama and because of the way the field was shuffled, my guess is that they’re going to get progressively worse as the days go on.
The only exit available for them is the debt ceiling. Republicans ought to close that door pre-emptively and keep pressing the advantage on the question of Obamacare and the continuing resolution.
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Q: So what’s different now, between this current Sequester-Shutdown-Apocalypse-of-the-Week, and the “Gingrich shutdowns” of left-lib lore (which N.B., transpired during a presidency possessing some scintilla of political imagination/talent as well as a few staffers outside the club of Harvard-Stanford haute-juicebox Twitter champs)?
A: “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 is you’ve got me”
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“Right now the GOP is holding up very well in the press and public opinion because it is clear they want negotiations.”
How is this remotely true?
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They do it is just the demands are crazy. As far as I see it the republicans are saying give us serious concessions on policy and we will fund the government for 3 months. Wow 3 months of the panda cam in exchange for a 1 year delay in the ACA. Why even have a liberal president if he just give up all his policy goals in exchange for a panda cam. Aside from the ACA what liberal legislation has he passed? If Obama Caves on this what is the point in voting for him?
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“Republicans are winning the shutdown fight, and Democrats know it.”
This is an awfully bold statement that I do not think a majority of people agree with. I tend to find people fall evenly into one of three camps:
1- Dems solely responsible because they won’t negotiate (and good, because the gov sucks and it should be shut down). We will call this the Fox News contingent.
2- A pox on both their houses! We will call this “Average person”
3- Tea Party is out to destroy America! We will call this the HuffPo/WaPo/NYT contingent.
So if 2/3 of Americans believe the house GOP is solely or partly to blame (and conversely, the same percentage think it is Obama’s fault), I don’t know how Erickson can so boldly claim the Republicans are winning and the Dems know it. I think it is also silly to believe that the longer this drags on, the worse Dems will look. Most people can see through the Republican attempts to partially fund the government. There is absolutely some validity to the argument that you shouldn’t use the budget process to repeal laws when you control half of one branch of government. If you want to repeal and replace Obamacare: win elections.
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What if they held a nonessential fed shutdown and nobody noticed? i.e. 2nd group in your list, the mildly-pro-Obama bloc who have already forgotten Cruz’s symbolic para-parliamentary grandstanding, the thread of Democrats’ plaintive wails about Rush Limbaugh, or the current events that have this HuffPo-bot chanting the broken web site address for Healthcare.gov at them.
Republicans can afford to worry about that 1/3rd, but can ignore the “strategy” of supplicating the left Cathedral bloc which already despised them. They are not much use as a political party if they opt for the latter.
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I see why so many people are frustrated with Cruz because the result of his 20+ hour pseudo-filibuster is that people who want to view the GOP with skepticism (or just plain outright contempt) think the shutdown is all about repeal of Obamacare, instead of delaying the individual mandate for individuals like he did big business. And now instead of talking about government funding and what we should spend tax dollars on (which is emphatically the province of the GOP-controlled House, to borrow a phrase), the Democrat/MSM Complex keeps talking about holding the full faith and credit hostage to repeal “the law of the land.”
The GOP surely botched the messaging initially, but I’m with JVL and Erickson that the news now is not nearly as harmful to the GOP as it’s made out to be (evidenced by how hard the MSM is trying to make it seem bad), and going forward the GOP is on much better footing by already having passed bills to fund vital services, to pay furloughed workers, and practically begging for negotiations. Not to mention that the White House has erred in using the NPS to make the shutdown seem worse than it is… then compounding it with the Amnesty rally on the mall.
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Like a few of the other commenters I think EE is really really wrong about this. You can’t look at how a well-informed voter ought to parse things. First, most voters aren’t well-informed enough to grasp nuances like “the Washington monument” strategy and so aren’t going to blame the president. Second, even very informed people can debate whose fault it is with these understandings being closely but not perfectly correlated with inter- and intra-party sympathies.
Ultimately you want to look at how voters do parse things and the polling suggests exactly what I and a lot of other center-right types expected ex ante which is that just like 1994 this has hurt the Republican brand.
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Gabriel,
I saw those polls, but then I also saw this comment from my favorite populist/libertarian writer, Ben Domenech, responding to a recent Ross Douthat column:
“Except the House Republicans weren’t trusted with anything like the reins of government even before the shutdown, either (they were already the most unpopular Congress ever before the last election – should they really fear the difference between 14 percent popularity then and 10 percent popularity today?). The American people have a longstanding belief, bolstered by a century of campaigning, that Democrats generally love government and Republicans generally hate it, and that’s fine in a midterm election, especially in an era when no one trusts the government with anything. The logical, responsible policy move here given Obamacare’s disastrous launch would be an individual mandate delay, just like Jon Stewart and Wolf Blitzer have suggested. http://vlt.tc/13kk Douthat’s right that Obama won’t ever agree to do that. But every day he doesn’t is a good day to advance the argument, and asserting that delay as the price of reopening the government doesn’t mean you have to get it in order to be successful.”
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I hate to say it, but Erick Erickson is a threat to the Republican Party. Without him and his like-minded peers, the GOP likely controls the Senate.
But anyway. . . Some recent polling data on the Republicans “Winning the Fight. . .”
– Like Gallup, this poll shows the Republican Party at record levels of unpopularity. Only 24 percent have a favorable opinion of the GOP, and only 21 percent have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Both are “all-time lows in the history of the poll.”
– The Democratic party, by contrast, has a 39 percent favorability rating. That’s pretty much unchanged from recent months, and is in fact the precise same favorability number Democrats posted in May.
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I see there’s still a lot of Progressives in the Republican Party.
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It is worth noting that as far as policy discussions go. When this started the Republican position was:
1: end Obama care.
2: end Obam tax increases
3: in exchange we will fund the government for 3 monthsnow the position is we will fund the government in exchange for serious negotiations on fixing our retirement system. Some thing Obama and moderate Democrats have always wanted. Things like removing chained CPI.
As a liberal I am happy the president got a spine and even if he takes a hit in the polls he is fighting for the things he campaigned on. That is what a politician is supposed to do.
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Mr. Tom:
Erick Erickson and his like minded peers delivered control of the House to GOP hands in 2010. Assuming your comment is genuine, don’t fall prey to the MSM’s post-hoc photoshop job of 2010, which focuses on O’Donnell and Angle and intentionally disregards the groundswell of TP sentiment that drove voters to the polls.
Furthermore, look at the IRS’s focus on the TP post 2010. That tells you all you need to know about the Democratic Party’s/executive branch’s opinion of the relevance of Erick Erickson and his like minded peers.
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I wonder of Erickson still thinks the Republicans are winning and the Dems know it. The events of the past week indicate the exact opposite- the Dems are winning and the Republicans know it. This is a debacle for the Republican party.
troy garrett October 8, 2013 at 12:32 am
If Obama caves and delays the ACA a year I will view him as a total wuss. A bigger wuss than getting punched in the face and tweeting about it.