You値l Pay for This, GOP. How Obama will make the 2013 shutdown a political weapon.
By William Saletan
“There are no winners here,” President Obama declared at the White House this morning. Then, with an elegant air of nonpartisanship, Obama began to fashion the shutdown into a political weapon. Here’s how he’s going to deploy it.
1. Economic excuse. Obama noted that before the shutdown, the economy was recovering, and the deficit was falling. The fiscal standoff changed all that: “Every analyst out there believes it slowed our growth.” Obama rattled off the damage: families going without paychecks, home buyers and small businesses unable to get loans, consumers cutting back on spending, CEOs reporting that the fiscal anxiety had “set back their plans to hire over the next six months.” Even the “threat of default,” said the president, “increased our borrowing costs, which adds to our deficit.”
Today, this litany of laments looked like simple compassion from the president. But over the next year, it can serve as an excuse. If economic growth or deficit reduction isn’t where we’d like it to be, Obama can blame the shortfall on the “Republican shutdown” or the “Tea Party shutdown.” He’d be following in the footsteps of his predecessor, who spent three years after Sept. 11, 2001, blaming economic disappointment on the damage done when “the enemy hit us.”
2. Republican downgrade. Two years ago, when Standard and Poor’s downgraded the government’s credit rating, it cited our high deficits as well as the 2011 debt ceiling standoff. Ever since, Republicans have argued that the deficits, not the standoff, caused the downgrade. This time, we haven’t been downgraded, but we’ve been put on a credit watch by Fitch, another ratings agency. And this time, there’s no ballooning deficit. Obama wants to make that difference stick. He wants the downgrade threat of 2013 to reinforce the Democrats’ narrative about the downgrade of 2011. “The agency that put America’s credit rating on watch the other day explicitly cited” the congressional standoff, Obama pointed out. The Fitch report, he went on, said that “our economy remains more dynamic and resilient than other advanced economies and that the only thing putting us at risk is—and I’m quoting here—‘repeated brinkmanship.’ ” “That wasn’t a political statement,” Obama added, politicizing the statement.
3. National security. Even after killing Osama Bin Laden,....
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