Why Jonathan Gruber May Have Been Right About American Voters After all

      The Right wing and the idiotic Centrist media are besides themselves because Gruber committed the blasphemy to suggest the average voter is stupid. Well if he's so wrong then how do you explain this?

        "Conventional wisdom is malleable, and it appears that conventional wisdom on the wisdom of shutting down the government is shifting, at least within the Republican party. While the old CW was that it was a terrible idea that Republicans suffered for, and it would be foolish to do it again, the new CW seems to be, "Hey, didn't we shut down the government and win the next election?"

        "The other day, influential conservative journalist Byron York beganpushing this line, writing that the 2013 shutdown "so deeply damaged GOP prospects that Republicans exceeded expectations in 2014, winning control of the Senate in spectacular fashion and making unexpected gains in the House." And now, as Dave Weigel reports, Republicans are taking it up:

In [conservative] circles, it's clear that the president can be stared down on immigration. And it's clear that a fight, even if it led to shutdown, would be either rewarded or forgotten by voters when they returned to the polling booths in November 2016. The reality of the Affordable Care Act had, after all, ended up winning elections for them in 2014. Why wouldn't the reality of Obama's new blunders elect the Republicans of 2016?

It's all deeply frustrating to Democrats. Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly, whose district's contractors and federal employees recoiled at the shutdown, had subsequently watched his state reelect its Republican congressmen and nearly knock off its popular Democratic senator. There clearly was no shutdown hangover for Republicans.

"From their point of view, frankly, while it had a temporary impact on their polling numbers, they fully recovered from that and paid no price at all on Nov. 4," said Connolly as he headed into a vote. "Politicians are all Pavlovian at a very elemental level. What's rewarded, what's punished. They look at that, and they think it seems to have been rewarded. It certainly wasn't punished."

     "This is entirely true. Approval of the Republican party took a nose dive in the wake of the shutdown, and though it is still viewed negatively by most Americans, that didn't stop Republicans from having a great election day. Because as at least some within the GOP understand, you can create chaos and crisis, and large numbers of voters will conclude not that Republicans are bent on creating chaos and crisis but that "Washington" is broken, and the way to fix it is to elect the people who aren't in the president's party. That in this case that happened to be precisely the people who broke it escaped many voters. The fact that the electorate skewed so heavily Republican in an election with the lowest turnout since 1942 also helped them escape the consequences of their behavior."

     http://prospect.org/article/how-republicans-are-learning-love-shutdown

      As Michael Kinsley once noted, democracy can goof. Why is it that you can criticize the politicains, Wall Street, the media, the legal establishment, but not the 'sainted' people who fall for such puerile tricks again and again? I don't have a good answer. 

      http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2014/11/democracy-can-goof-and-last-night-it-did.html

      Why do they always have to be let off the hook-it's not their fault, their overworked, they have no time to figure out what's going on, they are lied, to and tricked, they would vote for a 'true progressive' if they were running-it's all or nothing with them. They're bad at math and hate to read and cynical economists and journalists lie to them. Like Kinsley said, while the politicians, the media, and Wall Street are no prize, the people don't escape responsibility either.  

       I couldn't be happier about Obama's planned executive action on immigration tomorrow. 

       http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-sweet-it-is-delong-links-to-me-and.html

        There is political risk here that many people will buy into the GOP line that there's something diabolical about Obama taking perfectly legitimate, legal executive action here.. While most people actually favor the kind of immigration reform the President wants-and the Senate Dems along with a decent number of Senate Republicans voted for, they also seem to think there's something wrong with taking executive action to do this thing they claim to want. 

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/11/19/democrats-face-major-challenges-in-selling-executive-action/

      Whatever. I see this as what the economists call a free good-the GOP won't pass immigration whether Obama does this or not and they'll try to blame him whether he does it or not and it may well work and convince all these stupid people out there whether he does it or not so you might as well just do it. When people are going to knock you no matter what you do you might as well do what you want to do anyway. 

       The Dems need to stand with their President here. Harry Reid gets this. 

        https://twitter.com/SenatorReid

        I hope most Dems do. We see where throwing your own President under the bus got you. If they're going to knock you anyway, why not show some balls?

        Maybe Americans will respect that-they surely didn't respect the Allison Grimes gambit-Barrack Obama?! Yuck, he's got cooties! 

          http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2014/11/democrats-find-operation-chicken-falls.html