http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-catch-22-of-sequester.html
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-catch-22-of-sequester.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29
Yet according to a Talking Points Memo piece, the Dems are very confident.
"If it appears to you that Democrats are approaching the Friday sequestration deadline with greater poise than the GOP, you’re not mistaken."
"Democrats enjoy a massive public relations advantage over the GOP. Voters are prepared to blame Republicans. The Democrats have an unusually steady message. Republicans are lurching from message to message as they try futilely to blame Obama for sequestration’s very existence, while contending that its consequences won’t be so dire (except when they contend it will hollow out the military) and to argue just as futilely that Obama’s revenue demand is an act of duplicity."
"But Democrats are also confident because they have an institutional memory of winning a similar fight, when Republicans shut down the government in 1995."
“Before the government shutdown it was very much an open question in most people’s minds which party would win,” recalled Paul Begala, a Clinton White House veteran, and an insider at the time of the shutdown, in a telephone interview Friday. “Republicans were very confident at the time that the government would shutdown and people’s lives wouldn’t change. They were wrong. … [W]e all saw that theory proved in ‘95 and ‘96 and it’s going to happen again.”
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/why-democrats-are-so-confident-of-a-sequestration-victory.php?ref=fpa
The one trouble with this is what I had talked about yesterday: the idea that victory by the Democrats requires that we feel the immediate pain to the sequester immediately. If we don't, it's almost like that the GOP gets to do a Rush Limbaugh and declare, "See, I told you so"-basically that Obama and the Dems are being alarmist and demagogic as some GOPers have already called the President.
The shutdown in 1995 was a big moment as it proved that yes, we do need the government and do notice if it shuts down. After all a true libertarian would claim that we'd discover we didn't. That's not what happened. Yet do we want to root for pain in March? That's why I said the sequester is a catch-22 because to avoid the pain of it we have to feel immediate pain.
The Dems have a lot of advantages; a large one is that the public is already poised to blame the GOP for the sequester.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/poll-more-will-blame-the-gop-88081.html?hp=r4
However, there are some things that give the GOP reason to hope. One is that people may not be paying as much attention to the sequester which could be a real problem. If there isn't immediate pain-which again, in reality should be good news-it could be bad news if this enables Republicans to say 'see I told you this was just demagoguery'-and this could end up locking in the cuts. In this scenario the pain will only be felt later. The TPM notes that a sequester is different from either a government shutdown or letting the debt ceiling expire:
Sequestration is different from a government shutdown in some key ways. It won’t bring myriad government services to a halt, but it will delay them and complicate them and make things more expensive and less convenient for ordinary taxpayers. It will also lead to layoffs and furloughs.
"This week, the Obama administration is taking steps to publicize these costs, including the president himself, who will deliver remarks at a shipbuilding facility in Virginia on Tuesday."
“If you live in Newport News or Pascagoula or any other of a hundred Navy towns — San Diego to Portsmouth — you know this is going to hurt because this is going to stop construction on ships,” Begala predicted. “So I don’t think it’s going to last very long.”
"The harder part is explaining how and when Republicans relent on revenues. If they hold out through the month of March, the government really will shut down, just like it did in 1995, and the pressure on them to cave will amplify. But if they hope to end the standoff before then, it will likely require a party leader — or perhaps a GOP governor or two — to drag the rank and file in a more sensible direction."
“Bob Dole said enough is enough,” Begala recalled. “He stopped it. I may be selling Mitch McConnell short, but he’s no Bob Dole. He’s terribly smart, but he’s more worried about his political hide. … There’s always these gangs that form in the Senate so that’s a good thing. In the House, there’s Paul Ryan, but he’s done nothing.”It seems to me that a big mistake for the Democrats is to cave to the GOP demand that they let the sequester cuts go through in exchange for giving Obama and his cabinet departments more latitude for how the cuts are applied. I've seen some reports that the Dems feel they may have to except this proposal if we don't feel the bite of the sequester right away in March.
To win they need to be willing to allow the government to shutdown if the GOP is willing to. It's sort of like the deb ceiling: no negotiations that don't include tax revenues for the sequester. I think 1995 has disabused the GOP of the idea that using a government shutdown as a weapon has any viability as a strategy.
Meanwhile there is more good news on the horizon: many Virginia Republicans are pushing the GOP to avoid this.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/virginia-republicans-stop-sequester-88063.html?hp=l4
A really important thing that may push the GOP to accept a real deal to avoid this sequester is that so many Republicans are in states that depend on military contracts. Remember, a Republican voter is not a person who hates government spending but hates government spending that benefits others. When it's their benefits on the line they feel differently.
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