Remember the government shutdown last year that was supposedly a disaster for the Republicans? From bloomberg.com, “Why Republicans Think They Can’t Lose a Showdown with Obama“:
“Let’s think about all the hyperbole, the hyperbolic statements coming from everybody, particularly the talking heads on television,” said Arizona Representative David Schweikert, a member of the Tea Party class of 2010. “This was supposed to be the end of the Republican Party. The public would never understand what the fight was all about. Turns out the public was a lot smarter than a lot in the political class and media class gave them credit for. They were able to discern that it was an honorable fight over many of the things that were rolling out in the new health care law.”
Seems like the fight may have helped more than hurt the Republicans.
“That fight elevated the stakes of the debate, and as a direct consequence suddenly Republicans instead of being competitive in five or six or Senate seats are competitive in 10, 12, 14 Senate seats all over the country,” said [Texas Senator Ted] Cruz in August 2014, at the Iowa FAMiLY Leader Summit. “Obamacare is an albatross around the necks of the Democrats who foisted it on the American people.”
The conventional wisdom on shutting down the government may not have been right back in 1995, when the Republicans first employed the tactic.
“Tell me in what way we didn’t win,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich asked rhetorically in 2010. “After that, we got to a balanced budget. And what happened to the Republican majority?”
The Republican majority stayed the Republican majority. When the Republicans shut down the government last year, Public Policy Polling found “as many as 37 Republicans” in danger. What happened? From Bloomberg:
The 2014 elections went even better for the GOP than Gingrich’s 1996 survival run. Three members of the House Republican majority ran for Senate—Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, and Colorado’s Cory Gardner. All of them won. The first two won by landslides. Only two incumbent Republican members of Congress lost elections, and far more who were put on the October 2013 watch list triumphed.
One example? At the end of the shutdown month, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Pennsylvania Representative Mike Fitzpatrick and New Jersey Representatives Frank LoBiondo and Jon Runyan had watched their seats “nudged toward the Democratic column” by oddsmakers. LoBiondo won by 25 points, Fitzpatrick won by 24 points, and Republicans held the retiring Runyan’s seat by 10 points.
“This is the second shut down where the GOP got blamed and saw no catastrophe at the ballot box,” wrote RedState.com’s Erick Erickson on Tuesday. “Every horror story every talking head within the GOP Establishment trotted out to scare congressmen and senators into caving turned out to be crap.”
It’s all deeply frustrating to Democrats. Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly, whose district’s contractors and federal employees recoiled at the shutdown, had subsequently watched his state reelect its Republican congressmen and nearly knock off its popular Democratic senator. There clearly was no shutdown hangover for Republicans.
“From their point of view, frankly, while it had a temporary impact on their polling numbers, they fully recovered from that and paid no price at all on Nov. 4,” said Connolly as he headed into a vote. “Politicians are all Pavlovian at a very elemental level. What’s rewarded, what’s punished. They look at that, and they think it seems to have been rewarded. It certainly wasn’t punished.”
Here is a message for Democrats and RINOs. There are still millions of people in this country who don’t like or need the government, and wish there was a whole lot less of it. Unlike the Beltway Bandits and federal employees in Representative Connolly’s district, they see nothing tragic about a government shutdown, in fact they cheer it on. While lovers of government like to exaggerate the risks of shutdowns, there’s another risk they don’t acknowledge. Shut down the government long enough, and many hardworking, productive, private-sector people would discover they do just fine without it. A lot of government employees, contractors, and programs are dispensable. If the people paying for all this government ever seriously question why they’re laying out so much money and getting so little in return, who knows what might happen.
Amen!