Democrats have every reason to feel good about the resolution of the Republicans' latest concocted crisis. The nation was on the brink of default. The government was shut down. People were hurt and much worse was threatened. But Democratic leaders stood tall, they didn't bend, and it was the Republicans who broke.
On policy, this was a defensive victory, as Democrats weren't trying to gain anything new, but they did stop the Republicans from taking things away. On process, this was a momentum changer, as Democrats finally refused to accede to Republican brinksmanship, and forced them to concede a humiliating defeat. On politics, this was a huge victory. By refusing to engage, the Democrats allowed the Republicans to reveal themselves for what they are, and because of that the Republican brand is in unprecedented ill repute.
Having failed to taste the blood for which they'd been slavering, Republicans have begun to cannibalize themselves. The sane but cruel Republicans are in a death match with the deranged lunatic Republicans, and both factions are realizing that they no longer can pretend to be able to live with each other. They can smell the rot, but they don't recognize that it emanates from their shared political decomposition. In a demographic death spiral, their core issues resonating less and less, and with fewer and fewer voters, their desperation is as obvious as it is ugly.
The Republican Supreme Court majority is undermining campaign finance reform, and giving a green light to voter suppression, but that won't save their party. Aggressive gerrymandering alone temporaraily preserved the Republican House majority, but that has a time stamp, and now may expire prematurely. Their attempt to use the politics of bullying and extortion to invalidate elections they couldn't win at the polls blew up in their own faces. The Republican war on democracy and republic is failing. It is becoming transparent even to the apolitical. The Republicans cannot disenfranchise an entire nation.
The Democratic Party has been suffering from its own factional tensions, but President Obama's most ardent supporters and his liberal critics both have reason to feel vindicated. They also both need to pay attention to the polls, for while people have turned overwhelmingly against Republican extremism, a considerable majority is not impressed with the Democrats, either. There are lessons here. The president's most ardent supporters need to acknowledge that he was not playing 11th dimensional chess during the previous showdowns with the Republicans, and in fact made terrible mistakes both in process and content. He himself seems to recognize it. His liberal critics were right about how badly he handled the 2011 and 2012 budget and debt crises. But those liberal critics also need to acknowledge what it takes for a president to learn from such mistakes. Those who were expecting more bad deals, and more capitulations and compromises, were just as wrong as were those who defended those earlier bad deals and capitulations and compromises.
All Democrats need to accept that everyone has been wrong, but they should celebrate that everyone also was right. The president made terrible mistakes in negotiating with and appeasing extortionist Republicans in 2011 and 2012, but he is not an idiot, he is not weak, and he is not a sell-out. Before and during the Republican shutdown, he had every opportunity to repeat those past mistakes, or to prove that he was only looking for excuses to jettison traditional Democratic principles, but he didn't. He said he wasn't going to play the Republicans' games, and he didn't. Some doubted him. They might even have had fair reason to doubt him. But he proved them wrong by doing right. Democrats won this. All Democrats. The president, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the entire Democratic caucuses in Congress won this. Grassroots Democrats won this. Democrats who were wrong in the past and Democrats who were wrong about how this would play out won this. The country won this. Democrats should be united in celebrating this moment, and in preparing to use it to best advantage.
Read more about this victory below the fold.
It's time for Democrats to go on the political offensive. Some still expect the upcoming budget negotiations to result in some of the same mistakes from the past, but to do so ignores that so much has changed. The mistakes of 2011 and 2012 led directly to the sequester, but the reason Harry Reid insisted on guaranteeing funding the government only through Jan. 15 is because that is when the next round of sequester cuts would kick in, and he wants to stop those cuts and roll back this year's cuts. Some still expect austerity kabuki, but to do so ignores that the entire kabuki pattern has been shattered. This has been the least noticed and commented upon aspect of the new Democratic resolve. If the White House had in the past been using Republican brinksmanship as an excuse to justify legislating neoliberal economic policies that it secretly favored anyway, the White House itself, by forcing the Republicans into a humiliating defeat, has now eliminated that excuse.
There's nothing inherently wrong with discussing deficits. It gives Democrats the opportunity to reiterate that Republicans have no credibility on deficits, that their shutdown tantrum cost tens of billions, and that if they had been successful in repealing Obamacare, it would have added to the deficit, not reduced it. It also gives Democrats an opportunity to reiterate that the drivers of the deficit have been Republican policies, and that conservative economics don't work, ever. It also gives Democrats the opportunity to reiterate that Republicans refuse to repeal federal subsidies to the already obscenely profitable oil industry, or raise taxes on the wealthy. All of this is making good politics by arguing for good and popular policy. But it can get so much better.
The White House has proved that it no longer will tolerate Republican brinksmanship, and that means that it no longer has any means of redirecting blame. If it intends to sell chained CPI or other cuts to Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to try to do so on the merits. But cutting Social Security cannot be sold on the merits. Neither can cutting Medicare or Medicaid. And cutting them will not play with congressional Democrats, and will not play with the public, either.
With the Republicans in polling free fall, the Democrats need to turn around their own weak numbers, and they can do it by drawing the sharpest contrasts. It's one thing to be preferred because the alternative is crazy and dangerous, it's another to win people's hearts. Championing popular policies that the Republicans are attacking is a sure means of winning those hearts. Republicans are hypocrites on fiscal policy, and have been trying to kill Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since those programs were first established. After having shut down the government and threatened to blow up the economy, the Republicans now are on the brink of political oblivion. Democrats can help them take that final small step by making the next round of budget talks an explicit debate over Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, positioning themselves as champions of these popular and effective programs, while Republicans are trying to cut them. And by so doing, Democrats can earn great popular approval for themselves. They just proved they will not tolerate the Republican politics of extortion and brinksmanship, and they now should prove they will not negotiate cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And having won back popular support at the same moment the Republicans have lost it altogether, Democrats then can reframe the entire political conversation, so we can stop talking about gutting government and start talking about using government to help grow a robust economy.