So why are Republicans pursuing this "defund Obamacare, which you're not going to do, or we'll shut down the government and destroy the economy" threat? I'm not afraid they're going to succeed. I am eager to understand just where they think this game of Stratego is heading and are we giving them too much credit by presuming they know?
Jonathan Bernstein comes up with what seems like the simplest answer to it all, which is that they don't know…or care. It's all just a phallus-measuring competition. Here are two paragraphs that sum it up…
Remember, Republicans have mostly just given up on developing real, conservative public policy. We saw that in the 2012 campaign, in which Mitt Romney couldn't be bothered to come up with a tax plan that came close to adding up. We've seen it in the failure to come up with a "replace" bill on healthcare reform as part of their promised "repeal and replace" plan. Unlike in Ronald Reagan's era, or even Newt Gingrich's era (or perhaps more to the point, unlike in Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton's presidency), there's no conservative policy agenda beyond just rejecting everything Democrats want.
Simply put: When you've reduced your entire movement to saying "no" to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, is it any surprise that whoever shouts "NO" the loudest will wind up defining what counts as "conservative"?
Between 1969 and 1993, a man named Alan Cranston was a senator from California, and just after he was elected, he came and spoke at my high school. We had an "in" to get him since his son Kim was in my class. Overall, I thought Cranston was a good man but the speech he gave that day, though officially about issues like The War and The Economy and The Infrastructure was really all about The Senator. It was about him. It was like he was paying his speechwriter by the ovation. I thought he said little of substance; just lines that would get us to cheer him.
I think we often underestimate how much of what our leaders say and do is primarily about trying to remain our leaders; trying to amp up personal support for them and, of course, donations and volunteerism. I do not hear them often discussing The Issues. It's more like them discussing how vital it is for them to win re-election so they can continue to fight for what's right on The Issues. I wonder if before he agreed to address his son's high school, Senator Cranston remembered, "Those kids are going to be voters by the time I run for another term." And with the lowering of the voting age to 18 then seeming likely, we were probably going to be voters well before that.
What's driving the Republican "defund Obamacare" drive right now may simply be politicians who think their stance will give them dominance in their party…and they can worry later about what the extreme stance is doing to that party's chances for winning elections. Clearly, after all those predictions of a Romney landslide, they habitually underestimate how the average voter outside "the bubble" will respond. Heck, some of them even think or thought they could sell their constituents on the possibility of Obama signing, as opposing to vetoing, a bill that is never going to reach him anyway to destroy Obamacare.