So “long-shot” equals “impossible”?
If Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and House conservatives can justly be accused of being delusional, it is in adopting a strategy that banked on Republican unanimity in the face of withering opposition. It never happened; the intramural squabble started even before the shutdown.
Democrats could have pulled this strategy off. Indeed, their media-annealed steel is why we have Obamacare in the first place. But not Republicans
It wasn't going to work. I give Cruz and the others credit for trying, but the cards were against them.
It's not just about Republican unity, though. Add up the committed Democrats, and the non-political sheep cowed by all the doom and gloom publicity, and people who just wanted it to be over and that's something like a majority of the country. But McCarthy promoted the strategy so he has to defend it now.
I don't get the animus, though. Most Republicans in Congress had to have given the strategy some support for it to get as far as it did. No recognition for that?
Moreover, I'm not sure of all the details, but as I understand it the problem with public fears wasn't the shutdown, so much as it was the debt. Arguing that the shutdown was no big deal doesn't dispel the fears surrounding debt and default, foreign markets, bond ratings, etc.
That "Hail Mary Pass" metaphor gets grating after a while, too. One problem is if you try your last-minute play to win the game, you don't get to stretch it out or keep repeating it forever. You're playing against a clock with a fixed limit. Even if you wanted to go on forever, eventually the other players would go home.
So, kudos to those who tried the hardest, but recognize that a longshot play is a longshot, not a sure thing. If I sound hostile to Andrew, it's because he skews the argument, making his unlikely pet plan look a lot more likely to succeed than it was and just dismissing alternative strategies as flat-out impossible.