That’s how the guys who did the polling for the latest WSJ/NBC poll showing how far down Republicans are in the nationwide poll.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollsters Peter Hart and Fred Yang conducted the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. All are longtime practitioners, but even they seemed startled by the findings. McInturff wrote in an analysis, “Overall, this is among the handful of surveys that stand out in my career as being significant and consequential.” Hart called the findings “jaw-dropping.” …
… President Obama and the Democrats did not escape criticism, but the Republicans were in a different league in terms of how the public assessed blame. The shutdown has been a political debacle for the Republicans. Images of the Republican Party and the tea party movement, whose followers in the House pressed for the strategy that led to the shutdown, registered record lows. Just 24 percent said they had a positive impression of the GOP. The tea party’s positive rating was 21 percent. ...WaPo
If Paul Krugman hears right (and it seems clear that he does), the White House is left as nearly the last principled player. Actually, the last sane player.
What I’m told is that the really crucial thing for the WH is a matter of principle: no deal unless the extortion ends. And Rs just can’t or won’t give up the idea that they deserve to be rewarded for not blowing up the world.. …Krugman,blog
Well, there’s the fact that the Republican party is breaking the law.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
—Amendment XIV, Section 4.
That reminder comes from Hendrik Hertzberg who points out that the Republicans haven’t always been “insurrectionaries.” But, he points to their belief ” that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified.” Obama is left with the 14th amendment and the obligations of section 4. And, hey, after that?
In the end, Obama could have no honorable choice but to invoke the Fourteenth. There is little doubt that he would prevail. The Supreme Court would be unlikely even to consider the matter, since no one would have standing to bring a successful suit: when the government pays its bills, who is damaged? The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s. It would be all he could do to head off a post-Bloombergian boomlet to somehow get around another amendment, the Twenty-second, and usher him to a third term. …HendrikHertzberg,NewYorker
Even a new hope for a solution is bound to leave the tea party angry, frustrated and, of course, still armed for bear.
The White House and the Senate are working to squeeze House Republicans into accepting a bipartisan compromise from the upper chamber to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.
Any emerging deal, however, will leave ObamaCare largely intact, angering conservatives who have demanded defunding or delaying President Obama’s signature achievement.
House Republicans are fuming over the prospect that Senate Democrats and Republicans are working on a plan to jam them with a last-minute deal they would have to accept or risk triggering a federal default. …TheHill
They appear to have lost the opportunity to play up the Obamacare “glitches.”
Oct. 1 should have been a layup for Republican opponents of President Obama’s signature healthcare law, who watched as new insurance exchanges were beset by a slew of technical snafus.
But in a harsh bit of irony for the GOP, that was also the first day of a government shutdown driven largely by their own efforts to defund ObamaCare – a standstill that has dominated headlines all month. ...TheHill