Waldman lists a bunch of reasons that the GOP’s plan to pin the shutdown on Obama won’t work:
Republicans are the ones who hate government, and Democrats are the ones who defend it.
This is the heart of it. After so many decades of Republicans saying that government is evil, trying to slash it in a hundred ways, and more recently saying that they don’t think a shutdown would be all that bad, it will be all but impossible for them to convince people that they’re the ones who want government to stay open. Even if it were true (which it isn’t) they wouldn’t be able to convince people of it. They’re the anti-government party. That’s who they are. They worked very hard to create that image. So the universal default assumption is that when there’s a question of who’s responsible for shutting down the government, Republicans are the ones who are doing it, and persuading people that the opposite is true just isn’t going to happen.
A new CNBC poll finds that a plurality oppose defunding Obamacare and a majority oppose shutting down the government to do so. Ed Morrissey digs into the cross tabs:
[W]hile a majority of Republicans support defunding (51/36), a near-majority oppose a government shutdown over the issue (36/48 for shutdown). Independents break even more harshly against both, narrowly opposing defunding (40/44) but coming out almost 5:1 against a government shutdown, 14/65. In fact, the only demographic that favors this strategy, according to CNBC, is the Tea Party demo, which supports a shutdown strategy with a 54% majority.
The Dish 