More Thoughts On The Shutdown

If the government doesn’t really shutdown and no on actually cares... did it happen? Well, apparently it has happened and it’s going on right now. Anyway, here are more thoughts on this “shutdown.”

● The Optics: I’ve been really surprised that this shutdown has gone as well as it has. The Democrats are going down in flames right now. Obama’s approval ratings are tanking. There is dissention in Democratic ranks. Even the MSM is picking apart Obama’s claims. Why? Well, several reasons.

For one thing, the public hasn’t cared at all, so there is no immediate pressure on anyone to solve this issue. That benefits the Republicans who forced it and it deprives the Democrats of their entire strategy, which was to wait for the public to break the Republicans’ will.

For another, the Republican leadership has stayed on message, and it’s a good one. They keep saying, “Why won’t Obama negotiate with us?” That’s the perfect message to win Americans. Why? Because we are a rational people who believe you settle disputes rather than fight to the death. Here, the Republicans are being the adults because they are offering to talk. Obama is being the child because he is holding his breath.

Obama has helped this perception by hamfistedly trying to upset people by doing things like closing monuments that don’t need to be closed, by trying to shut down state-owned parks, by telling Wall Street that it should tank, by whining about essential people being furloughed when he is the one who decided who got furloughed, and by acting aloof and indifferent. This makes it really hard for the media to support Obama. Even worse, our fringe is silent as they don’t know how to play this, so they aren’t saving Obama with a distraction. In effect, the MSM can cover Obama or nothing... and when that happens, Obama flames out. That’s why his popularity is at an all-time low right now.

Further, the Republican leadership has played this brilliantly in the House. They have been passing bills doing things like funding cancer research, ensuring veterans get paid, and trying to open monuments Obama has shut. The Democrats have been voting against these (and Reid refuses to allow votes on them), and it’s killing them because these are the kinds of votes that will feature prominently in campaign commercials. In fact, because of this, 57 House Democrats have broken ranks on various issues.

What’s more, with the right not giving the media anything to attack, the media has little else to cover except the unfolding disaster of Obamacare... which only makes Obama’s problems seem even larger. For those who missed it, HUGE numbers of the people who signed up may not actually have coverage because they didn’t provide sufficient information. At the same time, tech analysts are now saying that the problem with the computers shutting people out is not a lack of server capacity, it’s a design flaw that the program tries to load too much information at once... meaning the system may need a redesign. Ha ha.

All of this is bad for the Democrats. But there’s something else that is going on that will force them to surrender fairly soon. Right now, the PR of both sides says they have no reason to surrender, but that’s not true. Boehner has no reason to give in: the shutdown happened... nothing important changed... no one cared... why stop now? It’s sequestration all over again.

Democratic math, however, is different. The Democrats are the party of government. When Obama was elected, they hoped he would restore the public’s faith in government. He didn’t. To the contrary, faith in government is at an all-time low. What’s more, the big non-event of sequestration taught people they had nothing to fear from budget cuts, the same thing is happening here now: the longer the shutdown goes on, the more people are learning they have nothing to fear from a closed government. This is disastrous for Democratic ideology which relies on people looking to government to regulate their lives.

Whoops.

● Foreign Policy Still Doesn’t Matter: As an aside, Navy SEALs grabbed the al Qaeda leader responsible for somethingsomething. In theory, this should have given Obama a huge boost, but no one cared. This again proves that short of all-out war, foreign policy simply doesn’t matter to the public.

● Why You Can’t Volunteer: Finally, this is worth pointing out. Whenever you have a shutdown, there are always stories of people volunteering to work for free (like a group of Catholic priests who are under contract to work on military bases) who get told they can’t volunteer during a shutdown, and people say, “That’s an outrage!” Actually, there’s a really good reason for that.

Before the Republicans depoliticized the government in the 1930s, a lot of contractors, employees and average citizens found themselves being pressured to provide favors to the government or government employees... or offering free favors for favors. Several agencies used this to add to their budgets to let them do things Congress hadn’t allowed. The law was changed to make it illegal to give something for free to the government to stop this (agencies also can’t keep money they earn because of this) – this is called an “illegal augmentation.”

So while this may sound stupid that someone can’t volunteer, there is a valid purpose behind it. This is an anti-graft provision because it’s impossible to tell who is just volunteering, who has been pressured, and who is hoping for a quid pro quo. So this is something to remember... it’s not nonsense, even if it seems like it on the surface.