I like Charlie Cook and I think he’s an excellent analyst, but he does sometimes exhibit some blind spots that I attribute to being too much of a creature of Washington DC. It’s not his fault; I find that I begin to lose my compass after just a day or two in the capital.
When it comes to the government shutdown, Mr. Cook’s blind spot is that he has not correctly identified what the Democrats are trying to accomplish. He thinks that the Democrats are trying to avoid a default and reopen the government, and their main concern should be related to enticing the Republicans to stop punching themselves in the face.
But the Republicans will never intentionally default on our debts, and it was never much more than the remotest possibility that they would do so by accident. That was a hostage that wasn’t a hostage. The GOP leadership has already ceded this point. As to the government shutdown, it’s very unfortunate, but really no more unfortunate the sequester which has been grinding people down all year long and has been hurting the economy. For the Democrats, the shutdown is undermining the people’s faith in effective government, which is a big problem. But, in every other respect, it is working in the party’s favor.
What the Democrats are trying to do is not to end the shutdown for its own sake, but to break the cycle of crises governance, where they are constantly being asked to make absurd concessions merely to keep the government operating. They want to take away the Republicans’ ability to hold a gun to our country’s credit rating and take away their will to shut down the government. And, since this is the priority, helping the Republicans save face by giving them some reward, no matter how paltry, is entirely counterproductive.
To put it in parent/child terms, if you have a boy who throws a lot of tantrums, your problem isn’t the particular tantrum he is throwing right now, but the fact that he throws tantrums whenever he doesn’t get what he wants. When you bargain with the child, you ensure that he will continue the behavior in the future because it is effective.
It’s very important to understand that the GOP is not going to default on our debts. They do not, in fact, have a gallon of gasoline and a match that they will light if we don’t give in to their tantrum. We don’t have to worry about that. All we have to worry about is the government shutdown. And we can wait on that.
I remember that the singer Joe Cocker once answered a question about how he decided to stop using drugs and he said, “You can only hit yourself in the face for so long before it hurts.”
We’ll just sit here and see how long that takes.
