Three days into the government shutdown, some media outlets think they have finally caught the GOP in a sneaky reversal over the defunding plan. It's actually just the plan that Ted Cruz has been laying out in public since at least July.
The general gist of a collection of recent tweets and Op-Eds is this: Republicans wanted to shut the government down unless Obamacare was defunded, but now that the thing is actually shut down they're suddenly changing course and trying to place the blame on Democrats.
The Atlantic Wire seems scandalized that Cruz retweeted a tweet from the @barackobama account that read "Retweet if you want this #shutdown to end." The site has a whole article dedicated to uncovering his apparently sneaky attempts to blame his own shutdown on Democrats.
In a piece called "Take Your Lumps, GOP" Jamelle Bouie at The Daily Beast asserts that the Republican party drove the government into shutdown and then quickly realized what a huge strategic miscalculation it was. "But rather than own up to it, they’ve adopted a new strategy: blaming the shutdown on Democrats for not acquiescing to their demands, and sacrificing their key accomplishment for the “concession” of letting the government operate."
The general outline of events in these pieces is correct. The problem, though, is that it is not a new strategy. It's exactly what Cruz said he was going to do 65 days ago at a Heritage Foundation appearance where he first unveiled the defund plan.
In his attempt to predict how the fight would play out, Cruz guessed that Democrats would "scream and yell" about how Republicans refused to pass a "clean" Continuing Resolution. Cruz then provided the very talking point that now seems to shock unsuspecting media outlets. Republicans, he said, should ask, "why is President Obama threatening to shut down the federal government because he wants to force Obamacare down people's throats...?"
He continued, "And then we've gotta win that fight. We've actually gotta stand by our guns." That's exactly what the GOP is trying to do now.
Democrats and national media are entitled to call this GOP plan cynical and manipulative if they want, but they have no right to be surprised by it. If mainstream outlets weren't so automatically dismissive of conservative ideas they might have something useful to say about this one, instead of being flabbergasted by its "discovery."