LESSON LEARNED

So you think the Republicans learned from the mistake of forcing a government shutdown back in the Gingrich era? Yes, they learned -- but the lesson they learned is not the one you think:

A top House Republican said Monday President Obama might try to force a government shutdown to hurt Republicans.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the top GOP member of the influential House Financial Services Committee, said Republicans should be prepared to be "brave" in the face of a shutdown.

"I would think when we send the spending bills to the president he will veto them, and then the hard vote will be when he sends them back and we will be faced with another situation where he will probably try to force us to shut government down and we are going to have to be brave this time," Bachus explained on the Fox Business Network....

That's what they learned: not to avoid shutting down the government, but to make sure that if they do shut down the government, the Democratic president gets blamed.

I've assumed for a while that they're planning to go for it, and that they assume that they just have to do better message management than Gingrich did. I didn't know they'd actually try to make their shutdown seem like Obama's doing, but, well, it's hard to imagine a message so credulity-straining that they wouldn't think they could sell it. They're damn good at messaging.

In fact, they're doing pretty well at messaging already, just with this dry run. Check out the end of the quoted story (from The Hill):

... Bachus's comments on Monday hint at early Republican posturing over a shutdown they might not necessarily want, but could be forced into if Obama takes a hard-line stance against congressional Republicans next year. Bachus sought to shoulder Obama with the blame and prevent the GOP from being tarred by a Democratic president. That was Clinton's tactic.

"We wouldn't be shutting it down. We would be cutting out the excessive spending. And if the president wanted to shut the government down -- but we would not shut the government down," he said. "But what we would do, we wouldn't allow him to force us to spend taxpayer dollars that don't need to be spent."

Say what? "[A] shutdown they might not necessarily want, but could be forced into if Obama takes a hard-line stance against congressional Republicans next year"? In the Hill story, this isn't in quotes. These aren't presented as a Republican's words. They're presented as an objective description of what might happen -- Republicans having no choice but to refuse to compromise with the president of the United States.

They're going to do it. And they're going to win the spin war.