GOP's silver lining playbook
by digby
Tyler Cowan:
Look where we stand. In real terms government spending has been falling. Sequestration appears to be permanent, or it will be negotiated away by Republicans in return for preferred changes in tax and spending policy. Leading Democratic intellectuals are talking about future fiscal bargains with no new taxes. The American public polls as increasingly conservative.[...]
The Republican tactics understand the importance of skewed pay-offs. In an age of political gridlock, the goal is not to maximize the expected value of your image, any more than you would do the same on a date. Rather the goal is to maximize the chances of moving your agenda forward, conditional on the existence of world-states where that might be possible. The harder it is to pull off change, the stupider your strategy will look in most world-states, but hey that is the price of admission to this game. Capital is to be periodically run down, and if in politics, as in management more generally, if you always look good you are doing something badly wrong.
Needless to say, the left is having a very big laugh at all this. And there is some seriously fatuous nonsense in pieces of it, particularly the wistful hopes and dreams about Obamacare failure. (The notion that the nation polls as increasingly conservative is highly debatable as well.) But it isn't all wet. We are living in a period of austerity and it's very hard to see how we change the trajectory of shrinking government under current circumstances. The best we can probably hope for is that it doesn't get any worse. So yeah, they took a hit in popularity and it may end up paying a price at the ballot box for it. But it's not a total failure --- it's two steps forward one step back.
.