Washington's Shutdown Double Dare
Each party's hoping to avoid a shutdown. Unfortunately, knowing that makes each side more willing to use a shutdown threat to shakedown their opponents.
If you're a Democrat, you think shutting down the government could crash the economy. If this happens and there's no time for a recovery by 2012, Obama's reelection campaign is doomed. He can blame Congress all he wants, but if the past is any guide, it's the president's party that will be punished at the ballot box. This time it really will be 1932, only with the conservatives in charge. Not a pretty scenario, and it suggests the Democrats should want to do just about anything to avoid a shutdown.
If you're a Republican, you think shutting down the government is no big deal; the private economy should cruise along just fine by itself. In this case, the economy's on track to bounce back in 2012, Obama's heading for reelection, and a government shutdown will just make congressional Republicans look like fools. So a shutdown is the last thing the Republicans want.
If you buy the above analysis, you have two sides that (a) don't want a shutdown, but (b) know the other side doesn't want it either, which means they can try to threaten a shutdown and extract concessions.
Overall, I think our politics would be healthier if such a doomsday weapon were off the table entirely. But given it's out there, it's interesting to think about how different perceptions of the shutdown's effects can induce a non-zero-sum flavor to the game.
Why wasn't it the same story in 1995? Two reasons. First, in 1995 we were not in recession, so it wasn't so natural to believe that a government shutdown would have much short-term economic effect. Second the idea that the economy determines presidential elections wasn't so generally accepted back then. Also, I suspect that Gingrich et al. deluded themselves regarding Bill Clinton's popularity. Nowadays we tend to think of Clinton as a political whiz, but if you take yourself back to 1995, you see a guy who snuck into the presidency with 43% of the vote in a three-way race, then proceeded to fail on health care and fight with his own party on NAFTA, and then got killed in the midterms. So congressional Republicans at that time could be excused for thinking that Clinton was a sitting duck.
Finally, why does Newt Gingrich apparently still support a government shutdown even now? I think it's quite possible that Gingrich personally believes that a government shutdown would be bad for the economy and thus good for the Republicans in 2012. True-believer fiscal conservatives would presumably think the economy would do just fine without the government mucking things up, but I've never seen any evidence that Gingrich is a true-believer fiscal conservative.
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