CHRIS CILLIZZA
Republicans in Congress would do well to avoid a confrontation with President Obama over the sequester.
Here’s why — in 3 very simple steps:
1. Regular people have no idea what the sequester is right now and, even once it kicks in, aren’t likely to pay all that close of attention to it unless they are directly affected by it.
2. Obama is popular with the American public [At present, his ratings are at 55%]
3. Congress is not. [15% popularity]
And here’s how those three steps work together.
Because the sequester is (and is likely to continue to be) very ill-defined in the minds of most Americans, the politics of it will devolve into a popularity contest between the major players. Which gets us to the fact that Obama is at (or close to) his high-water mark in terms of job approval while Congress sits in political reporter/used car salesman territory.
Given that dynamic, sequestration is a fight that Obama and his senior team rightly believe they can (and will) win. It’s why Obama continues to spend most of his time positioning himself politically on it.
Republicans in Congress are operating under the assumption that the blame game on the sequester — the subject actually hasn’t been polled all that much to date — will shift once people begin to pay closer attention. But that assumes that people will deeply engage on sequestration, a complicated topic whose impact outside the Capital Beltway may not be strongly felt immediately.
If they don’t — and you usually can’t go wrong betting on the side of the American public not paying all that much attention to the policy fights in Washington — then sequestration will turn into something approximating a high school popularity contest, and that’s not a game Republicans are positioned to win at the moment.
To be clear: Sequestration will, barring some sort of political deus ex machina, happen. But congressional Republicans may well look back and rue the day.