Ah, here we go again. The government shutdown went so well
for Republicans in 1995. Newt and others have tried to spin it in a more
positive direction lately but even he admitted at the time that it was a
disaster that helped reelect Bill Clinton.
Democrats are getting a lot of mileage from this and why
shouldn’t they? They’re making political gains because the Republicans are the
party that hates government. Simplistic? Wrong, maybe? Yes but anybody who has
ever seen a man-on-the-street interview knows we are not a well-informed nation
of geniuses. No nation is.
Charles Krauthammer says this whole thing is “nuts” and has
called these stubborn ones, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul, the
Kamikaze Caucus. (Three of them are likely presidential candidates for 2016.
How interesting.) Many call them the Suicide caucus. How about just “The Stupid
Caucus”? Jonah Goldberg said it seems like Cruz’ strategy is: Step 1: Shut down
the government. Step 2: Question mark. Question mark. Question mark. Step 3:
Total victory. In a closed door meeting
with Senate Republicans, it was leaked that Cruz and the rest were savaged by
the other Senators. He admitted in interviews on talk radio that he virtually
had no support. In contrast to the confident bloviating of his 21 hour
filibuster, he seemed quiet and chastised. Humbled even? Let’s not get ahead of
ourselves. Is he stupid like a fox? Maybe. This seemingly amateur move may be
designed to cement his nomination for president and it could work.
Shut downs are neither recent, nor rare. There have been 18
total, 17 of them since the ‘70’s. There is much hand wringing lately as to
what the rest of the world thinks of this circus. Is it a sign that our system
doesn’t work? No, it’s a symptom of divided government. We have checks and
balances and guess what? One branch is checking the other. Things are working
just fine. Don’t like shutdowns? Don’t live in a democracy.
Nevertheless, this whole thing is an unnecessary
conflagration brought about by people willing to bring the whole temple down on
our heads. It is a purely political move. There is no chance Obamacare will be
defeated or that it will be weakened in any substantial way. Slightly modified?
Mmmm….. possibly. But most don’t know that many of the offers from Republicans
were actually reasonable. The almost feckless Republican message machine can’t
beat the mainstream press who won’t report these details and the low-info voter
that we need remains solidly convinced Republicans are obstinate. FAIL.
Omnipotentblog has no problem with purely political moves. You need power to
make change. What makes this a farce is that the inevitability of failure is
staring us in the face. A substantial majority agrees that Obamacare is bad but
also disagrees with shutting down the government over it. When even a
Republican majority disagrees with the strategy, how on earth does that compute
to victory? For a hot second, I thought Cruz, the Ivy League lawyer who has
argued before the Supreme Court eight times, might be a genius. His filibuster
was manly and heroic and it looked like Republicans would be responsible after
making some effective noise. Nope. They cut the brakes on the Crazy Train and
hit the throttle.
Democrats are the party of the unhappy, a bunch of utopians
who think they can master the universe through feminizing bumper sticker
platitudes like “No human is illegal”. Good one. Republicans are the party of
masculinity. But conservatism is supposed to be pragmatic and realistic.
Liberals do what feels good. Conservatives embrace the tried and true. Yes,
Cruz is fighting for a conservative value: smaller government. What makes him
and his followers liberal, in a sense, is the tactic. Driven by emotion, they
seem to be co-opting the liberals’ reactionary do-something-ism instead of
asking the quintessential conservative question: “Will it work”?
The chance to retake the Senate in 2014 is realistic and
would be devastating to Obama’s legacy. It may be vanishing. An image comes to
mind: Republicans are in concrete bunkers on top of a steep hill with machine
guns and artillery. In the valley, slogging through the mud are exhausted
Democrats. Rather than wait for them to come into range and blow them to pieces
(metaphorically speaking, of course), we throw our weapons down, strip down to
our underwear, pick up sticks and rubber hoses and sprint down the mountain
screaming like mental patients high on PCP to engage the enemy. Why? It’s the manly thing to do. Thomas
Sowell noted
that, “There is a United States of America today only because George Washington
understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere,
but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic
confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be
afforded now”. The Republicans have a huge strategic advantage because of the
common mistrust of Obamacare. Even Mike Tyson would duck punches. So should
Republicans.
The coming fight over the debt limit is another story and
popular sympathies may…may suggest a shutdown could yield some fruit.
But Sowell writes, “By making a futile and foredoomed attempt to defund
ObamaCare, Congressional Republicans (and Cruz) have created the distraction
that Obama so much needs”. If you are still not convinced, take note of this:
Richard Nixon proposed federally run daycare, universal health care and a
guaranteed minimum income for the poor. These programs were sunk by Ted Kennedy
and other Democrats because they didn’t go far enough. Theygot greedy and missed a historic opportunity to permanently expand the
welfare state. We should not miss ours to dismantle it, even if it’s just by
taking a nibble here and there. Big fights and grand gestures might be sexy but
isn’t discretion the better part of valor? Apparently not.
So much for 2014.
