Peggy Noonan asks Wall Street Journal readers this week to consider an odd assortment of facts associated with the partial government shutdown.
Congressional Republicans didn’t want a shutdown—they wanted to ding ObamaCare without having one. Democrats did want a shutdown—they thought it would reveal the Republicans as crazy, irresponsible, at the mercy of their radical wing. That’s not what they said in public, but it’s how they thought things would play out.
The shutdown came. Republicans scrambled for a strategy: pass bill after bill to fund federal agencies and departments that have been closed. Keep those monuments open! They would get a shutdown without a shutdown, make their point while not causing the kind of pain that would come back on them.
The Democrats and the president responded by refusing to back the funding bills. Their strategy would be to keep everything closed, which would cause maximum pain for the citizenry, who would react by hating the GOP. And the people are blaming the Republicans, but the Democrats too. The Democrats have been reduced to trying to keep World War II vets out of their monument, and saying blithe things about children with cancer.
And what all this means is that Republicans, who hate big government, are fighting to keep it open, and Democrats, who love big government, are fighting to keep it closed. Strange.
