Replies

Nice try. I think the spin on this is lost. Everyone knows this is an ideological fight. The polls show public sentiment is against.

The caucus is split and the stories and comments show. The Dems are in lockstep. The republicans ran through the play book in a day. The planning, execution, and pr game have been mismanaged. What is the end game here? I am a smart guy but I do not see how the republican caucus wins here. What is a win? Keep it shut down forever? Obama will cave?

I am sorry I want to be happy over a shutdown but I remember 95 and 96. The goals were better defined 3 of 5 funding bills were passed so the shutdown was not as broad.

I have said it for a week. Republicans will cave probably within a week. Because of the reasons above we are going to lose and lose badly.

All this and Obamacare is on line now!

I hope I am wrong but I doubt it.

LIke I said, it could be very clever, if they realize it.

First of all, you and I know conservatives were lock-step into “defunding Obamacare”. And yet Boehner managed to get the conservative caucus to vote for fully funding Obamacare.

That is a pretty big deal. We all seem happy, and I don’t know why, because if the democrats had accepted the deal, Obamacare would be fully funded today.

Second, the one-year-delay of the individual mandate is wildly popular. Most people don’t like the IM to begin with, and think it was very unfair to keep once Obama waived the employer mandate.

Without the employer mandate, a lot of employees don’t have health insurance. Obama has denied health insurance. But worse, those people, because of the IM, are required to BUY insurance, or else get a big tax increase.

The Republican move would have given those folks the OPTION of going without insurance. This is NOT “denying health care” to anybody. Every person could still buy health insurance — there was not defunding of Obamacare, so the exchanges were still funded and the subsidies were funded.

All that the republicans asked was that we not levy tax increases on people who lost their insurance because of Obama’s illegal waiver.

That is a message that we can easily win. “Republicans are for tax waiver, democrats oppose tax relief and shut down government”.

The third part I thought was silly, but from a messaging perspective is powerful — the democrats shut down government to make sure they personally got subsidies for THIER health insurance in the exchanges, even though others won’t, and those who won’t get taxed for not joining.

So when democrats claim republicans tried to defund Obamacare, republicans can point out that this is a lie, and if the media is at all fair they will have to point this out. When the democrats claim the IM change was unacceptable, the republicans can point out they were just providing tax relief, and it had nothing to do with people’s access to health insurance.

I am not sure Reid knew what he was doing. By sending him successive bills, he got into the habit of just summarily rejecting them without thought. The first two were defunding bills, but this last bill was not. Did he fall for a trap? We’ll see.