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February 16, 2011

Shutdown showdown not needed

Joseph Smith
The President plans to lay a trap in the budget-cutting weeds, but Republicans can choose another path.

For weeks, Senate Democrat leaders such as Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Harry Reid of Nevada have been "preemptively blaming Republicans for a government shutdown," as CBS news describes it. 

All of which is prelude to setting up President Obama as the gallant defender of beneficent government and the Republicans as the bad guys who will shut down said government and cause misery throughout the land.

Politico reports that the President is "playing hardball with a veto threat," and milking Republican differences on defense cuts,

...even suggesting that Republicans were jeopardizing the Pentagon's ability to "meet vital military requirements."

The thinly veiled veto threat was delivered in a formal statement of administration policy just hours after debate opened in the House on the Republican plan.

All posturing aside, the Democrats would like nothing better than for Republicans to demand all or nothing, accept our cuts or else. 

But the Republicans have no need to go there, and in fact will be better served by simply keeping the debate alive, with only small compromises and short extensions of budget deadlines, forcing the Democrats to come back to the well again and again.

In a Townhall column, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann suggest the Republicans neither give in easily nor go for budget "Armageddon," but rather fight a guerrilla war designed to make the Democrats continually defend their big government agenda:

A budget deadlock, played out over months, will doom President Obama and assure his defeat. But an easily won compromise will help him get re-elected.

The central question in Obama's bid for a second term is: Will the issues that doomed his party in 2010 still be the key questions in 2012? If they are, we already know how the election will come out. If they are not, Obama can win.

When the president says he does not "want to re-fight the battles of the past two years," he means that he embraces this reality. He doesn't want Obamacare, high spending, huge deficits, cap and trade, card check and the like to be the items of discussion in the 2012 election...

Hence the strategy:

...Like a guerilla [sic] army, never go to a shutdown (a general engagement), but keep coming up with cuts, compromising, letting the government stay open for a few more weeks, letting the debt limit rise a few hundred billion, and then come back for more cuts and repeat the cycle.

While Morris is not always on target, he makes the case here that Republicans can hold their hard-fought electoral ground by holding the President accountable for his agenda right into the 2012 campaign.

As Morris points out, the Obama campaign wants to head for the tall grass, change the subject and once again pull the centrist wool over the eyes of the muddled masses.

By keeping the focus on the Obama big-spending, over-regulating agenda Republicans can keep the high ground rather than ceding it Obama.

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