Jim Geraghty delivers the eulogy:
The “Patriotic Saviors” pursued a goal that absolutely required Democratic votes in the Senate and a presidential signature, or, alternatively, veto-proof majorities.
The “Patriotic Saviors” or anyone who wanted to enact a serious change to ObamaCare, be it a delay in the individual mandate or repeal of the medical device tax, needed five Democratic senators and a presidential signature, or 21 Democratic senators and 58 Democratic members of the House to join all Republicans in the House and Senate to overcome an Obama veto. You can scream and shout about the "Washington Establishment," "RINOs," “squishes”, or anything else, but in the end, you need a way to get those who are loudly, publicly, and adamantly opposed to your proposal to change their minds and do something they’ve sworn they will never do.
They tried their best. Senator Ted Cruz offered his quasi-filibuster that went on for hours and hours. They tried, and they tried, and they tried to build a wave of pressure from outside Washington to sway those Democratic senators and the president.
They didn’t get them. It was always a long shot. As the shutdown began, it became clearer by the day that no Democratic senators could be dislodged from their pro-ObamaCare positions, and the president wasn’t willing to give an inch on ObamaCare, even as the exchange web sites face-planted on the first day and barely improved from that opening belly flop.
The past 15 days have been an exercise in self-inflicted polling wounds, as it was clear that the Republicans would always feel more pressure to A) reopen the government and B) avoid hitting the debt ceiling. The “Patriotic Saviors” insisted that this would end another way, that at some point Obama, Harry Reid, and congressional Democrats would flinch and put a better offer on the table.
They were wrong. I wish they had been right, but they were wrong.
So, now, to where do the goalposts for the "success" of this strategy get moved? As some Tea Partiers have told me, resistance wasn't futile because it was "standing up for our principles"; well, by that measure "Defunders" certainly succeeded. TPers also said that we must "fight" no matter what; on this, they succeeded as well. But in terms of actually accomplishing anything, of eroding ObamaCare and otherwise advancing the ball for the constitutional conservative cause, we got stuffed, as we were always going to, and seriously damaged the only political vehicle available to us for the advancement of said cause. No matter how I try to look at this - and I have tried - I can't spin that into any kind of "success". And it is impossible for me not to remember that some of us predicted this outcome from proverbial Day One.
Now if it would end at that and we could all let bygones be bygones, close ranks, and march forward together, as Jonah Goldberg and self-professed "Cruzer" Ben Howe urged yesterday, that would be the best thing we could do for constitutional conservatism. Because, to paraphrase Charlie Brown, there will always be another battle - more specifically, come January 15th and February 7th, at least theoretically.
But Lucy always did pull that damned football away, didn't she? And grassroots righties were already burning Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell in effigy yesterday afternoon, Sean Hannity - who really ought to know better - was calling for a "conservative third party," and all the usual squalling our side goes through whenever it doesn't get its way. This, I wearily imagine, will go on for quite some time, perhaps all the way to next fall, when the Tea Party will "teach the GOP a lesson" by "staying home" rather than vote for "RINOs," which can only have the end result of turning the House back over to Nancy Pelosi & friends, allowing the Obamunist blitzkrieg of 2009-10 to resume. You know, the one that gave us ObamaCare in the first place, rammed down our throats by the Donk hegemony that was entrenched by the previous occasion of the conservative base trying to "teach the GOP a lesson" in 2006 and 2008, which gave us Barack Obama in the first place. One would think that "patriotic saviors" would start making this connection and figuring out at some point that politics is a zero-sum game, and that they keep serving as their own worst enemies, and O's unwitting allies. But that would require thinking in lieu of emoting, now, wouldn't it?
So I humbly ask my Tea Party friends to ponder these points:
1) See the Geraghty quote again. Phrased another way, "elections have consequences" - whether they're legitimate or stolen. If you're pissed about how Shutdowngeddon ended, don't blame Boehner and McConnell, who always had a weak hand to play; blame the 62 million numbnuts who voted for ObamaCare a year ago by re-electing its namesake and an expanded Democrat majority in the Senate. Or ACORN. Either way, it ain't the fault of the GOP.
2) You insisted that Republicans "fight"; well guess what? They did. The House "defunded," and delayed ObamaCare, after having previously repealed it altogether over forty times. They put down a brief RINO uprising, plowed into the shutdown, and kept it going for over two weeks, right up to the precipice of a default. They represent us, and they did as we asked them to do. You cannot claim that they didn't "try".
3) If you're looking for somebody to blame, how about....James Madison & Co.? Remember that the Founders set up our constitutional system to be a stable one by making huge, drastic policy changes very difficult to pull off. The Left has successfully overcome these barriers three times in the past eighty years (i.e. The New Deal in the '30s, the Great Society in the '60s, and ObamaCare now) by way of engineered crises that manipulated the electorate into temporarily giving them the power to ram this socialist superstructure in place. They've then used our system to prevent the Right from rolling any of it back, even as the system itself has been, er, "progressively" weakened by it. The latter is what reached its latest endgame yesterday. If we want to change that, and not just get rid of OCare but also roll back the entitlement/welfare state, we have to win elections, and thereby the power to affect the changes we want. That's how the system the Founders bequeathed to us works. And that necessarily includes playing the political "game" and understanding that yes, politics IS a business and IS a profession wherein success - i.e. getting elected - requires a lot more than just nominating people who completely, 100% agree with you, but also organization, volunteers, and yes, money, and also the mature willingness to link up with - and perhaps even nominate instead - people who don't completely, 100% agree with you, if that's the only way to win.
Or, in short, if Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al were here today, they'd tell the Tea Party to grow up, stop whining, and stop writing verbal checks that their electoral numbers can't cash - until its account has sufficient "funds" to cover them.
Feel free to sing the Doxology, because this service is concluded.
UPDATE: If it makes you feel any better, there are Lefties who don't think we lost:
It's not just that Obama looks likely to accept the sequester cuts as the basis for future budget negotiations. It's that while he's been trying to reopen the government and prevent a debt default, his chances of passing any significant progressive legislation have receded. Despite overwhelming public support [sic], gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama's second term agenda, looks unlikely. And the other items Obama trumpeted in this year's state of the union address—climate change legislation, infrastructure investment, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost to the minimum wage—have been largely forgotten.
Democrats keep holding out hope that losing yet more public support will break the ideological "fever" that grips the Republican Party and help GOP moderates regain power. The problem, as the last few weeks have shown, is that the GOP keeps defining moderation down. For instance, the Washington GOP's plummeting approval ratings may well boost the presidential prospects of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, just as the Gingrich Congress paved the way for the comparatively moderate George W. Bush. Like Bush, Christie is described as moderate because he has Democratic allies in his home state and because his rhetoric is not as harsh on cultural issues. But in the White House, Bush's economic policies were hardly moderate. To the contrary, from taxes to social security to regulation, he governed well to the right of Ronald Reagan. Christie likely would as well. As governor, after all, he's vetoed a hike in the minimum wage, cut the earned income tax credit, vetoed a millionaires' tax three times and adopted basically the same attitude towards public sector unions as Wisconsin's Scott Walker.
Yet for the next three years, the press will likely describe Christie as "moderate" for the same reason it now describes a "clean" CR as Republican surrender: Because the GOP keeps moving the ideological goalposts and the press keeps playing along.
This isn't an endorsement of the Big Man by any means. Indeed, I don't think there are going to be any more elections because I don't think Barack Obama is ever going to relinquish power. But if there are, and he does, I just have one question: Don't you think a President Christie would sign a bill repealing ObamaCare?
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