Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans from Democracy Corps. The word cloud describes Obama
Democracy Corps:
While many voters, even some Democrats, question whether Obama is succeeding and getting his agenda done, Republicans think he has won. The country may think gridlock has won, particularly during a Republican-led government shut down, but Republicans see a president who has fooled and manipulated the public, lied, and gotten his secret socialist-Marxist agenda done. Republicans and their kind of Americans are losing.
Now imagine those same people in the House as voting Representatives. Welcome to 2013.
NY Times:
The overarching problem for the man at the center of the budget fight, say allies and opponents, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the fiscal showdown.
David Weigel:
“Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things,” said Washington Rep. Jim McDermott after voting no on one of Thursday’s GOP bills. “You can’t deal with ’em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare—affordable health care—in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can’t figure out how to admit it.” Why would House Democrats give away what the Supreme Court and the 2012 electorate didn’t? “You can’t say, OK, you get half of Obamacare—this isn’t a Solomonic decision,” McDermott said. “So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”
Matthew Green:
To the extent to which my measurements are accurate, the size of these groups underscores the difficulties Boehner faces in passing legislation or overcoming the “Hastert Rule.” For instance, if no Democrats vote for a G.O.P. leadership bill on the House floor, and Boehner cannot get his “No” caucus behind it either, the bill dies if more than a half-dozen Republicans defect—giving significant leverage to the 26 members of the “Difficult” caucus. And the small size of the “Loyalist” caucus—which does not include Eric Cantor, by the way—means Boehner has a very small foundation of internal support. (Binder and Cillizza, it should be noted, identify far more potentially loyal Republicans based on their metric – between 80 and 100 – in part because many of those in the “Fearful” caucus have been loyal supporters of leadership on key floor votes.)
It's John Boehner's inability to lead that has put us here; this post illustrates the problem.
More policy and politics below the fold.
Jonathan Alter:
So that’s where we are: a Speaker desperate to avoid a repeat of the most searing defeat of his life, but unable to cut a deal that might satisfy his members. Were he a less frightened man, we’d be in a better place.
NY Times on Steve King's Iowa:
Professor Schmidt said it might be Mr. King and his allies who have to back down. Most Iowans “don’t yet see the connection with their lives,” he said. “But there’s a whole integrated system of government and policy that supports the economy that they benefit from.” Even in rural Iowa, “We’re completely and utterly dependent on the performance of the government: on a stable currency, on meeting our debt obligations, on confidence in the United States economy and in our political system.”
Jill Lawrence:
What Happened to 'Compassionate' Conservatives?
Veteran Republicans are watching the shutdown in horror. Maybe the best to come from it will be public longing for the return of compassionate conservatism.
Bloomberg:
People Are Calling This Obamacare Insurance Exchange in Tears
When the exchange opened—17 minutes later than the 8 a.m. scheduled start time—the website and call centers were flooded with inquiries. Walsh said that in the first few hours“it was just raw emotion calling in.” People eager for insurance, at times in tears, wanted to get coverage that they didn’t have before. “They were calling up saying, ‘Can I get my coverage today so I can see my doctor this afternoon?’” he says. “That is in one sense moving but also frustrating because, sure, you can sign up—but the coverage can’t be effective until Jan. 1.”
Know anyone named "emptywheel"? I do.
Long before Edward Snowden leaked documents showing that the government was collecting every American’s phone records, Marcy Wheeler knew something fishy was going on. She was one of just a handful of people who in 2009 suspected that the government was using the USA Patriot Act to collect Americans’ personal records in bulk. On June 5, 2013, Snowden proved her right.
You’ve probably never heard of Wheeler, a Michigan blogger who plies her trade far away from the closed world of Washington, D.C., but her work enables journalists, lawyers, advocates and experts to unmask the government’s secret spying apparatus.
“She’s really a wealth of knowledge,” said Amie Stepanovich, who does policy and litigation work on domestic surveillance for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy group. As a resource Wheeler’s blog is “just horribly helpful.”
So remind me, what's a journalist?
Like I said, so remind me, what's a journalist?
Frank Newport:
Opinion about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tilts negative in almost all recent polls, although the margin of the negative tilt varies widely. In Gallup's last poll, 41% approved and 49% disapproved. The Kaiser Family Foundation's September poll finds a 43% to 39% unfavorable over favorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act. Of those who have a negative reaction in the Kaiser poll, about 17% (7% of the total sample) said it is because the ACA doesn't go far enough.
No poll that I have seen so far supports the idea of shutting down the government in order to stop the ACA from continuing to unfold. Or, for that matter, defunding it. The percentage of Americans who favor either of these options is significantly smaller than the percentage who have an unfavorable opinion of the healthcare law. In other words, although Americans generally tilt negative in their opinion on the ACA, opinion does not go so far as to say that defunding or shutting down the government should be used in order to stop it. (Here's a useful summary.)
The public so far tilts toward giving Obama more of a favorable reaction than the Republicans in this shutdown. In Gallup's latest survey, it was Obama at 40% vs. Republicans in Congress at 35%, in terms of who is acting more responsibly. More Americans say this shutdown is about political positioning that say it is about principle. This same cynical attitude pertained back in the 1995 shutdown.