Posted on 09/23/2013 8:41:38 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Republicans who fear the effects of a possible government shutdown over Obamacare next month seem, chiefly, to fear that Republicans will be blamed. This blame would translate into losses in next year’s mid-term elections, and if those losses are large enough, they could cost the GOP not only a shot at re-taking the Senate, but could cost control of the House as well. Democrat control of Congress would give Barack Obama nearly unchallenged power for his final two years in office.
Some Republicans fear the consequences of a shutdown so much that they’re smearing Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texan who is leading the defund effort, sniping at him in the media and even sending opposition research on him to Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace.
Their fears are understandable, but they’re overblown.
The 1995 government shutdown, which pitted then House Speaker Newt Gingrich against President Bill Clinton, is widely seen today as a disaster for the Republican Party. It wasn’t. That shutdown put a major dent in President Clinton’s prestige and popularity, while at the same time most Americans actually experienced no ill effects from it. The sky did not fall.
Gingrich and the GOP probably would have won the shutdown outright if he had not come off as a sore winner a few months later, when he appeared to blame it all on a personal snub by Clinton to him. Sen. Cruz and today’s other GOP leaders can be expected not to make such a bonehead, self-centered mistake. They are not Newt Gingrich.
Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton. Clinton was a superior politician whose instincts were less ideological than Obama’s. Clinton was able to connect with a majority of the American people directly; Obama has remained aloof and distant during his entire term in office. Clinton was seeking re-election and was thus more malleable; Obama is a far more rigid ideologue who is not facing re-election. Obama is more liable to mistake his re-election for a freer hand to combat Republicans now than Clinton was, and overreach. He made that mistake over gun control, and failed spectacularly. Obama has no one around him in the White House or among his congressional allies to rein in his leftist instincts.
Obama is already badly weakened. The gun control defeat and the more recent debacle over Syria have left him unable even to pass a resolution allowing the use of force against a rogue state dictator. In the Obamacare fight, he would be fighting to preserve an unpopular law that is rightly being blamed for destroying jobs and costing millions of Americans their health care coverage. Obama would be fighting to preserve a law that did not enjoy majority support when it was passed and is just as unpopular now. Obama is threatening to shut down the government just to keep that unpopular law on the books. Republicans can win the communications war over Obamacare.
Another reason that a 2013 shutdown may not play out like 1995 is the fact that the Chicken Little caucus has already been discredited. President Obama and the Democrats predicted Armageddon if the sequestration budget cuts, which Obama’s White House proposed in the first place, were enacted. Those cuts kicked in months ago. Has Armageddon happened? No. Most Americans haven’t even noticed any adverse effects at all. The predictions that sequestration would do massive damage have been proven to be hysterical and wrong. Current predictions that a government shutdown would do massive damage are similarly hollow. The economy is already weak, weaker than it was in 1995, but that’s largely because of Obamacare now. Killing that law will help the recovery. Most Americans won’t even notice a government shutdown, unless Obama and the Democrats somehow manipulate events to make the shutdown more painful. But doing that risks exposure for them.
Republicans who fear another shutdown should go back and study what really happened after the 1995 shutdown. The following year was a presidential election year. Bill Clinton was re-elected, but mainly because he ran against a weak GOP opponent who had opposed the 1995 shutdown, and because the shutdown had taught him that he had to move to the right in order to win. He signed the GOP-crafted welfare reform law in 1996. He and Gingrich would go on to craft the nation’s first balanced budget in a generation. And the GOP did not suffer major damage in Congress. They lost a few seats in the House, but actually gained seats in the Senate. Obama will not move to the center no matter what.
Barack Obama isn’t even on the ballot in 2014, but if his antics produce a government shutdown, he will be. Vulnerable Democrats in places like Arizona, Florida and elsewhere will not be embracing him or Obamacare. They will be running away from him and his destructive law.
The GOP needs to worry about continuing down the wrong path they took with Juan and Romney.
Voice of reason, thanks. I heard very recently was intimating that the only reason Bob Dole lost to Clinton was the govt. shutdown! We are in very different times and Cruz recognizes the need to rally those with principles who see the cliff we are heading towards. Cruz is also thinking strategically, and is light years ahead of the GOP lightweight naysayers.
Scared money doesn’t win!
If Dole lost d/t the govt shutdown it’s not well recognized, but if so it would have been due to his APOLPOGY for the shut down.
GOPe doesn’t get that the apology capitulation, bowing to the power of the media, and especially, comfortable conservative pundits.
Sen Cruz does get it. He doesn’t blink nor apologize for his views. He doesn’t now to the media. He is a way out in front of them in a different zone.
Western Journalism website apparently has uncovered a major reason why even Republicans are now not so gung-ho about repealing Obamacare. The bill is so packed with lobbyist kickbacks and payouts - not only to pass it but to implement it - that they stand to make untold billions off of government attempts to get the law running. The lobbyists who wrote the bill have apparently hedged their bets, and have probably started promising untold campaign dollars to a number of Republicans to resist repeal. It’s always Follow The Money. It’s a fact that there will be a small number of select people making untold profits off of taxpayers and deficit financing to implement the law. And evidently a lot of Progressive Republicans have wormed their way onto one of the Obamacare Special Interest Teats to suck.
The Republicans did not “lose” in 1995. They managed to take the initiative away from Billy Jeff entirely, including the balancing of the budget (wrongly attributed to the Former Occupant of the Oval Office, 1993-2001), welfare reform, and balance of business expansion against regulation and taxation.
The Republicans went on to shoot themselves in the foot in 1996 by agreeing it was “Dole’s turn” for the nomination, and by not pulling out ALL the stops in the prosecution of the treasonous villain in the Oval Office, not for his indiscretions with an intern, but for giving away secrets and concessions to the Red Chinese, for not vigorously going after the new enemy of the Republic, militant Islam, and for turning loose a lot of outright criminals with very valuable contracts upon the Treasury.
And for not stripping George Soros of his immunity and prosecuting him separately for his funding of these same centers of mischief.
Yeah, Ted Cruz can be president of the North American Union, but not the United States.
Bob Dole was an old cripple running against a fresh young good looking man with ideas and a great talent for public speaking.
The fact that he was a decorated Veteran did not help him as it should have, but he was another Republican who was chosen because it was his turn, and not because he could win.
This is all philosophical.
I have yet to hear a coherent theory for how the Republicans, a minority in the US Senate will get the House bill that includes defunding of Obamacare passed by the Senate, and how they will overcome an Obama veto.
Anyone?
Had Fox news on and Cornyn say he will support the house bill. Whatever that means.
Grahma was on and seemed to support it too....for what thats worth.
It means they will support cloture so funding can be returned to the bill.
Ted Cruz Ping!
Let me know if you want on/off this ping list.
Please beware, this is a high-volume ping list!
HMMmmmmmm. Thanks. I should have know it was BS coming from Cornyn. Ill keep making my calls and sending emails.
"OPPOSE CLOTURE on Dingy Harry's 0bamaCare Funding vote - not to even let it come up for a vote, OR YOU ARE VOTING WITH DEMOCRATS TO FUND 0CARE".
Of course, Obama will not sign a bill that defunds Obamacare.
However, keeping the pressure on could get result in a negotiated year delay in the individual mandate and the exchanges, buying time. I’d take it for a start.
The 1995 shutdown generated a pizza, a thong, and a blue dress.
Dole had huge negatives, not the least of which was the bitch he was married too. As head of the Red Cross Elisabeth Dole was in your face defiant when the Red cross shenanigans in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing came to light. Her behavior was not forgotten although Bob did barely manage to carry Oklahoma in spite of it.
It was a bitter campaign with a piss poor candidate who had never met a tax increase he didn’t like.
You bet, we can win. the future of America is riding on this issue. Folks....kill Obamacare right now....TODAY!!! You all know what to do.....sign & endorse the Lee/Cruz Defund Obamacare Petition right now...immediately, if notsooner, like TODAY!!! Call all thos RINO, weak sister Republicans and give some badly needed backbone and courage!!!! Onward to VICTORY!!! Screw Harry Reid and Obama!!!
(WWW.DONTFUNDOBAMACARE.COM)
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