Talk about burying the lede. Seven paragraphs into a report it headlines “Poll: GOP Gets The Blame In Shutdown,” which purports to show how lopsidedly an angry public has come down against Republicans over the so-called shutdown of the government, the Associated Press grudgingly drops this little detail:
Most Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling his job, the poll suggests, with 53 percent unhappy with his performance and 37 percent approving of it.
In fact, the spin notwithstanding, the poll is full of bad news for the administration. While the AP/GfK poll finds that 62 percent blame Republicans for the shutdown, “about half” blame Obama and congressional Democrats. Eighty percent of respondents “felt no personal impact from the shutdown” (even though 68 perecnt say it’s “a major problem for the country”). Fifty-two percent say Obama is not doing enough to cooperate with Republicans.
As some of us argued when pre-”shutdown” polls indicated heavy opposition to shutting the government down as part of an anti-Obamacare strategy, (a) people would be much less upset about the ho-hum reality of a “shutdown” — the ongoing farce doesn’t actually come close to shutting the government down — than about the abstract but dread prospect of a shutdown as hysterically foretold by the Obamedia; and (b) as it emerged over time, despite the Obamedia’s best efforts, that the GOP was willing to fund the government (at current astronomical levels) and that it was Obama keeping the government shut down to protect Obamacare (an unpopular program that is clearly not ready for implementation and from which Obama exempts corporations, Congress, and cronies), the Democrats’ position would be increasingly hard to defend. What we did not anticipate (but should have based on Obama’s Alinskyite proclivities) was how much worse the Left could make things by stridently refusing even to negotiate, cutting off access to national parks and cemetaries (to say nothing of private homes and the ocean), and letting it slip that the administration is staying up nights thinking of new ways to make the “shutdown” as painful as possible (something that requires a good deal of thinking given that, for the most part, the government — unlike Obamacare exchanges — continues to muddle along).
If the shutdown is a coup for the president, what would a defeat look like?