I think Dick Armey is right about this and that Boehner, for better or worse, probably thinks the same way:
My position was, Republicans get blamed for shutdowns. I argued that it is counterintuitive to the average American to think that the Democrat wants to shut down the government. They’re the advocates of the government. It is perfectly logical to them that Republicans would shut it down, because we’re seen as antithetical to government. I said if there’s a shutdown, we’re going to get the blame.
At the same time, Republican presidential candidates will all have to say they want a shutdown in order to appeal to the the party’s insane right-wing base:
Actively rooting for a shutdown is probably going to become a litmus test for GOP candidates, and Pawlenty not only is right there, he’s savoring the confrontation aspect of it, which is the real point for the voters he wants. Most of all, they want a fight.
It’s quite possible that Boehner will ultimately have to bow to the wishes of the far right, but he obviously has a different set of incentives than Republican presidential candidates.
Crashman
Bring it.
Ija
It’s hard for me to imagine Republicans being blamed for anything, especially since our “liberal media” will bend over backward to help make Republican’s case. This seems wayyy too optimistic to me.
Bulworth
Oh, I don’t know. Boner’s apparently willing to sign on to the two week stop-gap measure. I thought the teatards were going to flood the Capitol with teabags if the Repubs allowd a temp measure to go through.
Tom Hilton
The national security analog is Republicans being perceived as strong while Democrats are perceived as weak. People see what they expect to see, no matter what’s actually there. Your basic government shutdown is at least one situation where that works to our advantage.
MikeTheZ
Dems will cave and give the wingnuts everything they want. Its their M.O.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
I don’t have the same sort of sanguine outlook on the mechanics, message management and public blame on shutdown as others here.
1. These fuckers are Nihilists, and simply don’t care about the consequences of their actions.
2. The last shutdown was pre-internet. Since then, they’ve had 15 years of people talking in echo chambers managed by the operant conditioners of the Koch/Hunt/Ahmanson/DeVos faction of giggling douchebags. There will be substantial support for bringing everything down, “just because”.
3. Sadly, shutdown doesn’t mean REAL shutdown. Military paychecks will still flow, defense contractors will still get paid, lighthouses and airport control towers will still be manned. Who cares that some folks won’t get to visit national parks or get their passports issued?
Alex S.
Who wants a shutdown? Certainly the conservatives. And I also think that Republicans will get the blame, so the few remaining Democrats in swing districts might want it, too, because they can exploit it politically. Who is trying to prevent the shutdown? Certainly the liberals and moderates in safe districts. But also the few moderate republicans and republicans in swing districts. It’s a pretty balanced situation. The wild card here is the republican leadership, especially Boehner himself. He would get the blame for a political defeat. But can he control his caucus with the republican primaries looming in the background?
Elia
The big question is simply whether or not he can exhibit a modicum of control over his caucus. Despite the media suddenly deciding that a shut-down has been “narrowly averted” (Thanks, Cokie!), I’m not at all convinced that he’s got anywhere near the clout with the Tea Partiers needed to avoid this. And if he does, don’t you think the chances are high that they’ll be calling for his head sooner rather than later? It’s kind of a fascinating game of chicken between two sets of incentives for Boehner; and if “The Wire” has taught us anything, it’s that when forced to choose between the health of the institution or one’s career, a guy like Boehner is going to opt in favor of his own skin every time.
Guster
@Ija: I agree, but this is the first time I’ve felt a glimmer of hope. ‘Democrats shut down government’ doesn’t make CW who-won-the-morning type sense the way ‘Democrats want to spend your money on Caddys and T-bones for the swarthy masses’ does.
Pococurante
Of course the real issue is tax reform. But the bread and circuses by both parties ensures we’ll never see the revenues that are supposedly built into our forecasts.
Southern Beale
This is why Boehner was in Nashville last night telling the National Religious Broadcasters that the country is broke. To the far right fringe, shutting the government down is “responsible.”
geg6
Well, since the GOPers are all so Christiany and all…
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
FTR, I have my doubts that any 2 week compromise (no matter HOW tilted to the right it may be) will get past the Teatards.
gene108
@MikeTheZ:
As much as I wish Democrats would go full tilt wing-nut, in sticking to what they want to do, our government was set up to be governed by compromise.
If anyone is serious about governing, there will be compromises.
General Stuck
The right wing echo chamber is a thing to behold, and of course Armey is correct in his basic analysis on who gets blamed for shutting down government, his party that hates government at a gut level as a matter of basic belief. But behold this morn, a spanking new poll shows just the opposite.
reposted from thread below
These idiots now are fully self contained for justifying about anything they do. Need to calm the fears of the winger rubes about the pol risks for the GOP for doing something that is near certain to hurt them, off come normal inhibitions, cause propaganda central command says it’s okey dokey, good to go.
And obviously, there is not much limit to what can be justified through dubious polling. Need to set up liberal reeducation camps, not to worry 55 percent of the public approves.
These people are not only clowns, they are very dangerous clowns.
Kryptik
@Guster:
That’s why the CW will end up being ‘Dems caused it by bankrupting the entire nation’, casting Repubs as the stalwart heroes who had to pull the plug before the very United States was destroyed.
cyntax
While I don’t want a shut-down because of the trouble it will cause for many of the least financially secure among us, I’m not sorry to see Boehner caught between a teabag and a hardplace.
Kryptik
@gene108:
But then we have a problem of one side wanting to compromise, and the other side saying ‘ENOUGH IS NEVER ENOUGH’, and it ceases to become compromise. It instead turns into one-sided concession.
ericblair
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
I’m not sure it’s nihilism as much as the fatal error of believing your own bullshit. The first generation of the modern GOP were pretty much scam artists who were fleecing the rubes. The new crop of goopers ARE the rubes.
From this morning’s news, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to be on board with the two week can-kicking bill. My guess is Boehner’s going to need the Dems on board since the teabaggers either won’t or can’t vote for anything besides teabagger budget nirvana. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen with this, because even if there is a deal, the gooper crew is incompetent enough to shut things down by just fucking up the paperwork. That goes for the debt ceiling too.
geg6
OT, but may be worth watching…
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/anonymous-targets-koch-backed-americans-for-prosperity.php?ref=fpb
I wouldn’t be surprised if the denial of service is cover for other, more damaging, hacking. Like of emails and such. Heh.
catclub
@Southern Beale: This is what drives me batty. If you have people lining up to loan you money ( at 1% interest, for ten years) YOU ARE NOT BROKE.
Ask George Bailey in Its a Wonderful Life.
Also: Heard Dean baker on NPR saying this about Japan, which has TWICE the debt to GDP ratio that the US has.
He neglected to disparage the rating agencies that are starting to say that the US ratings should be downgraded.
They are also the idiots who had no problem rating CDS bonds AAA when the only triple A it was was triple A crap.
Roger Moore
It’s so unfair. The Republicans will be blamed for a shutdown just because it’s their fault. The Republicans are so far out in noise machine territory that they see this as a media failure rather than a success.
jwb
@General Stuck: I’m just waiting until the wingnuts stop even bothering with putting their thumb on the poll results and instead just make up the results they want. Much of the Rassmussen polling already seems that way. If they’ve spun off another firm to operate the same way (and provide another data point to “confirm” suspect polls), then we’re pretty much there.
gene108
@Kryptik: The 111th Congress didn’t turn into one sided concession.
The Republicans wanted tax-cuts as the only form of economic stimulus, in the winter of 2009. The Democrats got through a stimulus plan that included more than just tax-cuts. Yes, it was too small, but it wasn’t what Republicans wanted at all.
The Republicans want to maintain the status quo on health care. The Democrats got through sweeping health care reform legislation. You may not like it because it’s not single payer or lacks a public option or because of the mandate pushing everyone into the private insurance market, but it sure as hell isn’t the status quo.
There’s probably more stuff that got done, which wasn’t capitulation, but rather compromise, since capitulation would be passing the sort of bills the House, in the 112th Congress, is passing now or more likely just doing nothing, but passing tax cuts.
Barkley G
This shutting down the Government is such a distraction. Republicans should just move on to the real business at hand and Impeach Obama already.
Guster
@Kryptik: Yeah, that’s the down side.
Our only chance is that that explanation involves a single iota of complexity. That is, it’s if the DemonRats hadn’t done this, then we wouldn’t have had to do that. That’s kinda complex for the media. So maybe, for one, the whole
gene108
@Barkley G: I think they learned their lesson in 1998 about impeachment.
There’s no point to impeach a President, unless you have a supermajority in the Senate, because what’s the point of impeaching him in the House, if the Senate will just let him off the hook?
piratedan
@Barkley G: So they’ll have to get outside funding for their witch hunt, gee I wonder where Issa can find the money for an army of investigators to dissect the odious wrongdoings of the current administration. I still wish Obama had gone after the Bushies for their crimes, that would have put these rethugs on the defensive instead of allowing them to pull the rank idiocy that they have been engaged in.
Maude
@catclub:
The bundled mortgages had 3 levels. The CDOs were made so that the ratings agencys would put an AAA rating on these packages, because before that, they would have had lower ratings. The ratings agencies didn’t understand the bundles and they fell for it.
We are not Japan.
WyldPirate
@gene108:
And yet the insurance rates continue to skyrocket far above and beyond the rate of inflation as the insurance companies more than make up the slack for the increased coverage requirements in addition to getting millions of new customers.
and it will be repealed as soon as the Rethugs can possibly get it all done…
I’m still not buying what you are selling…
Tractarian
Here’s a scary new poll showing that more voters would blame the Dems than the GOP for a shutdown.
On the plus side, fewer than half the respondents agreed that shutting down the government would have a “negative impact.”
Uloborus
@gene108:
So very This. And let’s not forget that Obama compromised on tax cuts… and got a PILE of crap in the lame-duck session. Including the all-important DADT repeal that the ‘Democrats always cave’ narrative was telling us we wouldn’t get because Democrats would cave and give the Republicans everything and get nothing back.
The Republicans, on the other hand, are employing the bully pulpit, fighting aggressively, asking for twice what they want, and refusing to compromise on their principles. This has exploded for them in WI, and is going to do the same thing with the budget.
The thing about being practical is that it really is practical.
cyntax
@Tractarian:
Well at least we’ve got a well informed electorate to help maintain that whole functional democracy thing.
EdTheRed
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
Also, too: Ha! Gitalong, gitalong!
Uloborus
@Tractarian:
See @General Stuck pointing out upthread that this is in fact a fake poll under a cover name so that people won’t know it’s Rasmussin.
Cris
No, Dick Armey isn’t right about this. Sure, it may be true that Republicans get the blame for a shutdown, but it’s not because they’re “seen as antithetical to government,” which he would wear as a badge of honor. It’s because they’re the ones shutting it down.
It’s like saying Tim McVey gets the blame for OKC because he was anti-government. But actually, it’s because he set off the fucking bomb himself. There’s no need to appeal to some ideological orientation here.
The Moar You Know
@Yevgraf (fka Michael): Nope. My buddies downtown have been told to get ready to take unpaid leave or vacation time, but if we get to a shutdown that this is coming out of their hides.
Mike in NC
With Boehner, money talks and bullshit walks. He’ll do whatever his corporate masters tell him to do.
Ash Can
Like others here, I have little confidence that either Boehner or Cantor have enough pull with the newest group of wackos in the House to get enough of their fellow Repubs to support anything but the scorched-earth wet dreams of the teabaggers. It remains to be seen whether political common sense (such as it is at this point) can prevail over a mob of barking lunatics bent on destroying the government.
Dennis SGMM
I won’t even try to predict the outcome here. The Republicans sent some serious loonies to the House and Boehner may face a revolt by members of his own caucus if he doesn’t come up with enough cuts to make the baggers happy.
Davis X. Machina
Hey, you can govern, or you can win elections, but you can’t do both — and these guys don’t have any real interest in governing. Leadership, yeah, but who’s going to lose their House seat — if 30 incumbents lose in the House, it goes into the history books — over a shutdown?
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
The Actual Orange Satan(TM) is in charge of just about no one, except maybe a sommelier or two, and perhaps a greenskeeper. So I expect the serious loonies to thwart any attempts he may make to “find common ground” (since the AOS rejects the word compromise, you know). It’s gonna be a shitstorm. But elections have consequences, and we are about to experience some.
Bubblegum Tate
Hmmm, I guess the wingnuts I read are out of step with the winger talking points, as they maintain:
1. Nobody on the right is talking government shutdown; it’s only the DFHs who are pushing for that, and it’s a damn dirty lie to suggest otherwise.
2. Impeachment is absolutely on the table (they maintain that Obama’s DOMA stance is an impeachable offense, as is the fact that he’s not susepnding HCR since that one judge said it was unconstitutional), and it wouldn’t hurt the GOP at all because it’s just a liberal media myth that the impeachment of Clinton hurt the GOP back then.
MikeTheZ
@Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q): I demand AOS be added to the lexicon!
Davis X. Machina
@Bubblegum Tate:
They may have something. After all, the guy who lost his Speakership, and his seat, for fucking up the last impeachment, and actually losing House seats in a mid-term election to the presidential party is getting ready to run for President.
Barry
@gene108: “There’s no point to impeach a President, unless you have a supermajority in the Senate, because what’s the point of impeaching him in the House, if the Senate will just let him off the hook?”
To make him look bad, and to occupy his time and energy for a couple of months.
catclub
@Davis X. Machina: “is getting ready to run for President.”
Is continually pretending to be getting ready to run for president.
fixt for ya.
Ruckus
@jwb:
They make up lie after lie anyway what do they need real polling data for? To do real polling and get the answers you desire you have to actually write questions with only one answer and you actually have to poll people. That takes time and money. Why not just make up results? It’s fast, it’s simple, it’s cheap. And who can check? No one if you don’t provide your raw info for them to check. And even if you did that would only take a couple of hours to put together a 1000 cell spreadsheet/database filled with bullshit.
ET
Boehner is not as stupid as the tea tards. He is all about power and is smart enough to know that a shutdown is not good for the GOP – especially the ripple affect. He is trying to thread the needle or at the very least trying to keep the tea tards happy while still looking like someone who is in charge and knows what they are doing (relatively speaking). Don’t know how successful that will be.
People used to liken wrangling the Democratic coalition to herding cats that looks quaint to what Boehner has set himself up as leader of.
rikryah
go Orange Julius.
go.
shut it down.
eric
“Actively rooting for a shutdown is probably going to become a litmus test for GOP candidates, and Pawlenty not only is right there, he’s savoring the confrontation aspect of it,”
If Pawlenty has his way won’t the government have to cut back on inspection of bridges and other infrastructure?