I guess the purists wanted a shutdown last week, although I'm hazy on that because I guess they can't bothered to tell us. But with all the charges of "preemptive surrender," the purists seem to be demanding that everyone else take their ball and go home and forfeit the remaining games of the season.
Th question is, if we had a shutdown this week, what would we have used as leverage next week? Another shutdown? Yeah, that's a plan. If Obama tried that twice, he would have been the boy who cried "wolf."
Democrats can play the shutdown card maybe once to good effect, and without control of the House, Obama does not have a lot of options. So using a shutdown would have been surrendering future fights.
We already know that would have been a catastrophic mistake, leaving Obama with an empty gun in the upcoming fight over raising the debt ceiling and the Ryan budget.
The only reason we know this is the GOP strategy is that the GOP told us and went on television to brag about it so we know what that future fight will be.
The only reason we were spared a preemptive surrender on Medicare was that Ryan showed his hand before the continuing resolution debate, a move which has to go down in history as one of the dumbest strategic screw-ups since Napoleon decided to attack Moscow in the winter. And then Boehner decided to make the CR all about Planned Parenthood, which is the dumbest strategy blunder since Hitler decided to attack Moscow in the winter.
Without these monumental GOP screw-ups, the purists here would have been demanding a Obama lead with his trump card (a shutdown), which would have let the GOP use the Ryan budget to create their Cultural Revolution, their clean slate reengineering of society.
But it seems like a lot of purists here are in a snit because Obama didn't walk into that trap of preemptive surrender on the debt ceiling and and the Ryan budget.
I'm not making bold claims about what's going to happen next, I'm just pointing out what the GOP has already told us they are going to do.
Notice, that the people responding will make bold claims about their certain knowledge of the future, while completely ignoring the strategy the GOP has laid out.
It would be nice if people would say what they want and just not pitch a fit, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.