GOP strategists are getting very worried as the debt ceiling comes up for a vote again. They know how insane the tea party caucus is within their party and understand that there's not much they can do to stop the lunatics within their midst. In 2011, Bill O'Reilly even tried to stop nuts like Michele Bachmann from trying to block the raising of the debt ceiling in the above video.
When BillO sides with an Obama appointee on anything, you know it's serious.
TPM:
Republican strategists would feel a lot better about the party's chances in this year's midterms if it weren't for some Republican lawmakers.
The Hill reported Saturday that the looming debt ceiling battle has a number of GOP strategists "anxious about the party’s capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
Only months removed from a government shutdown that represented a huge embarrassment for Republicans on Capitol Hill, some strategists are urging their party's lawmakers to cool it with their demands for concessions ahead of the Feb. 7 debt ceiling deadline.
“What Republicans have to realize [is] the political winds are in our direction. We can’t risk changing the winds at this stage,” GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak told The Hill. “You can shut down the Obama agenda completely if you have the Senate.”
One unnamed strategist told The Hill that another GOP pratfall on the debt ceiling might be the Democrats' only hope to win back control of the House. And here's longtime strategist Mark McKinnon's straightforward take on the situation.
"When Republicans screw with the debt ceiling and threaten a government shutdown, their unfavorable ratings go up. When they talk about Obamacare, Democrats’ unfavorables go up.”
There's a new poll out from Pew which shows how ignorant Republicans are when it comes to the economy.
The latest findings from Pew Research Center showed that while a slight majority of all Americans — 51 percent — believe that it is "absolutely essential" for Congress to raise the debt limit before the Thursday deadline, 69 percent of tea partiers said the U.S. "can go past the deadline...without major economic problems."
Thirty-six percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. can safely go past the deadline, while just 23 percent of the tea party said it's essential to raise the debt ceiling. An overwhelming majority of 67 percent of Democrats called raising the debt ceiling essential, while 52 percent of Republicans said that the deadline could pass without triggering economic problems.
The reasons for this are not surprising, since many republicans turn to wingnut source material for their answers. Fox News went on a debt ceiling-denier blitz when the debt ceiling vote came up last year and then politicians like Michele Bachmann followed their lead by constantly lying about it as often as they could:
BACHMANN: I think we just heard from Standard & Poor's. When they dropped our credit rating what they said is we don't have an ability to repay our debt. That's what the final word was from them. I was proved right in my position. We should not have raised the debt ceiling and instead, we should have cut government spending, which was not done and then we needed to get our spending priorities in order.
Expect the same reaction from the same people as the vote draws near. I seem to remember Fox's Steve Doocy remarking that the "sky didn't fall down" over the sequester cuts, so that will be a probable talking point on the debt ceiling vote.
