The distance between the supporters of the shutdown and their “perspective” on public support and actual polling data could not be more stark. It may be that in this nation, threats to destroy the nation’s economy to gain political ends may be considered “going over the top” of what is reasonable. Certainly, I feel that way.
James Pilant
Ted Cruz Is Living On Another Planet – Yahoo Finance
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ted-cruz-living-another-planet-172534587.html
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the public hates the shutdown, Americans are 20 points more likely to blame Republicans for the shutdown than Obama, the Republican Party is scoring its worst poll numbers on record, Cruz\’s colleagues in the House and Senate hate him, and they\’re preparing to cave to the president by reopening the government and funding Obamacare.
Cruz is betting that his supporters are too stupid to notice that his strategy is failing and was doomed to fail. He\’s probably right.
Lots of people thought that when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election after months of conservatives proclaiming that the polls were \”skewed\” and he was on course to win, the party\’s base might start to evaluate whether it misunderstood the world around it.
Remarkably, conservative delusion about facts on the ground is more intense than ever. The appetite for stories like the one Cruz is telling is unending, impervious to facts and sustainable no matter how far the Republican Party\’s poll numbers fall.
When constituencies become aggrieved minorities, seeing themselves as under attack by the establishment, they are vulnerable to hucksters like Cruz, because they disregard outside warnings and evidence that they are being had.
via Ted Cruz Is Living On Another Planet – Yahoo Finance.
From around the web.
From the web site, Attention Deficit Politics.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz is defiant towards the needs of the American
people. Ignoring the fact that 48 million Americans were uninsured in
2012, ignoring the fact that Americans with health insurance were
footing the bill for the emergency room vists of the uninsured (by way
of high healthcare costs), he is defiant in an attempt to cloak the
universal health coverage (emergency room visits) formerly provided via
high health and insurance costs.
From the web site, Market Failure.
http://marketfailure.wordpress.com/tag/ted-cruz/
I would note that Mancur Olson would disagree with
the “strategic irrationality” viewpoint, seeing this as a collective
action problem. Namely, political entrepreneurs like Ted Cruz see great
advantage from forcing a shutdown in terms of publicity, donations,
position within the party, and so on. This is causing the entrepreneurs
to act in their own best interest, to the detriment of the party as a
whole. In this story, the devolution of funding power from party
organizations to third-party funding like SuperPACs has destroyed the
coercive element necessary for the party to act in its own best
interest. In a neat little irony, the GOP’s relentless attacks on
campaign finance ultimately hampered their ability to do pretty much
anything. Let’s call this “group irrationality“. Perhaps the Democrats should be glad that their superPAC infrastructure is so much less developed.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 