The Irony of Shutdown 2.0 and Obamacare

     The whole point of this was to get rid of Obamacare or at least hobble it and instead it's gone forward while the GOP has gotten what it said it didn't want-another govt. shutdown. Yes, there were plenty of war stories about all the alleged problems of Obamacare in its first day of exchanges.

    “The shutdown has completely gotten in the way of the message of Obamacare not working,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, a Capitol Hill veteran.

   “If there were no government shutdown, Republicans could train all their fire on the failures of the exchanges in a ‘see, I told you so’ approach,” said Bonjean. Instead, he said, “the Republicans are having to fight a two-front war for public opinion — on the government shutdown and Obamacare — when they would rather be focused on the Obamacare rollout.”

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/gop-off-message-on-obamacare-government-shutdown-97680.html#ixzz2gWKPQdTg

    Of course, as Greg Sargent says, you should take all the horror stories about the exchanges with a grain of salt. 

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/01/ignore-the-daily-spin-wars-over-obamacare/

    However, there's little question that this is hardly the messaging the GOP wanted. The irony is taht party's strategy-'my way or the highway brinksmanship' has never been very effective. Recently even the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted this. 

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   I mean if you really believed that there were problems in Obamacare the answer would be to correct them. There may well be things that do need reform but because the GOP will only entertain fantasies over repeal that are no longer possible we can never get any reform. Maybe they think that their all or nothing at all strategy somehow maximizes things for them. Actually it usually ends up maximizing their losses as the final solution has no concessions from Democrats as there's no reason to make them as the GOP didn't participate.