by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
Democratic senators up for reelection in 13 months are now embracing, in their calls to delay Obamacare, the same themes as did the House Republicans and a few senators a few weeks ago—hoping to preempt mounting criticism. In this surreal landscape, three weeks ago Obamacare was unquestioned “settled” law (despite the fact that the president himself unsettled the law by suspending the employer mandate) that only dead-ender “anarchists” and “hostage takers” wished to stop or amend. Continue reading “Obamacare Redefines the Shutdown”
glitches with a new-model iPhone. But a better comparison is the disastrous 1985 campaign to replace Coca-Cola with “New Coke,” a new sweeter formula that was supposed to stop Pepsi from gaining more market share. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in slick ad campaigns, and all sorts of sales strategies, the public simply revolted at even the idea of the new formula, and a few years later, after all sorts of face-saving measures, the Edsel-like effort quietly was dropped.
President Obama, tempers might cool. And had President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis.
single recent October 8 press. All at once, the president used a weird assortment of similes and allusions to brand ad nauseam his opponents as little more than ransom takers, house burners, defaulters, global-economy crashers, nuclear-bomb users, extremists, threateners, extortionists, hostage takers, plant burners, and equipment breakers. He then bragged that domestic oil and gas production on his watch are at an all-time high—true, but he left out the salient fact that such gains are entirely the result of exploration on private lands, given that under his administration new federal oil and gas leases have by intention radically slowed. In 2010 actual oil and gas production on federal land hit historic lows. Ditto Obama’s brag that he lowered the deficit by half. If that claim turns out to be true, it is largely because of congressionally imposed sequestration cuts he opposed and record-low interest rates of scarcely over 2 percent that reflect a moribund 
gains in U.S. domestic energy production, despite the return of the Clinton-era tax hikes to the top brackets, and despite the end of the war in Iraq and the wind down in Afghanistan.
At first glance, the Republicans seemed to be losing the so-called shut-down impasse, inasmuch as Obamacare, as the president termed it, was “settled law” and the Republicans did not have the congressional clout to overturn it. No one likes, after all, to be turned away from Yosemite on a pleasant autumn day, because of Beltway gymnastics.