Inching Closer to a Shutdown

At first, a shutdown of the government resulting from an impasse on budget issues involving Republican leaders in the House and the Obama administration seemed like a dim possibility. The last shutdown, in 1995, didn't go over well with the American public, and the Republicans took the brunt of the blame.

But many Republicans say that's an unfair characterization. Their view is that back then, President Clinton could have avoided a shutdown simply by agreeing to GOP terms in the budget debate. It was his fault, they argue, that things went awry, and the media simply went along with the administration's efforts to blame it on Republican obstinacy.

Last week, in a Politico interview, Grover Norquist, head of the influential right-wing group Americans for Tax Reform, said times have changed. "There's now a Fox television network. There's now the Internet, in a way there wasn't back then. So ... when Bill Clinton vetoed the budget and closed the government, saying the Republicans had closed the government, ... [that] is not something you could sell again."

This view, coupled with the harsh attacks on administration policies that fueled the GOP sweep in the midterm elections, increases the odds that the Republicans will go to the ramparts with Obama over spending, and not compromise while biding their time waiting for the next set of elections in 2012, argues Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. "You can't convince your base that the president is destroying freedom, undermining capitalism, and threatening 1920s Germany-style inflation, and then turn around and tell them to just wait things out for two years," he writes.

Still, newly minted GOP leaders with long memories may remain skittish about the nuclear option in the budget debate. After all, 15 years ago, a shutdown may just have delivered a Democratic president a second term.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)