Bill Clinton won the P.R. battle with Newt Gingrich’s Republicans over the mid-1990s federal government shutdown.
But Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner article suggests times have changed.
Sometimes you get an idea of the way opinion is headed by the phrases you don’t hear. Case in point: In all the discussion and debate these past weeks about a possible government shutdown if Congress and President Obama fail to agree on funding bills, I don’t recall having heard the phrase “train wreck.”
I think that’s significant, because back in the 1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans and President Clinton failed to reach agreement and the government actually did shut down, “train wreck” was a common term.
And of course a derogatory one. The implication was that a government shutdown was a horrifying mess. In fact, the country weathered the 1990s shutdowns pretty well. And so did Gingrich’s House Republicans, who lost only nine seats in the next election — a lot fewer than the 63 seats Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats lost last November.
Which is not to say that voters view a shutdown as an unalloyed positive. But you’re not hearing it described as a train wreck, either.
House Republicans passed a stopgap funding bill Tuesday that will keep the government open after a Friday deadline, a measure that Obama and Senate Democrats have signaled they will embrace. But that would just postpone the prospect of a shutdown for two weeks. If the government is shuttered then, who would the public blame?
Both sides equally, say pollsters in surveys taken over the past two weeks.
