In the days leading up to the March 1 sequester deadline, dire warnings about its impact were being issued daily from President Obama. Lines at airports would be interminable. First responders would be compromised. Things would be, in a word, bad.
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Then the sequester hit — and (almost) no one noticed. (Sidebar: It’s kind of like the “snow” storm currently “hitting” D.C.; lots of advance warning, very little immediate impact.) The sky is falling language seemed overblown, and the devastating consequences amounted to the suspension of public tours at the White House. Obama hasn’t helped himself post-sequester — landing in a bit of political hot water with a mistaken claim about what the sequester would do to janitors on Capitol Hill.
A number of Democratic strategists condemned the strategy behind the sequester gambit by the president — albeit under the cloak of anonymity. [Fix note: We initially quoted several of these strategists without their names attached. But, we’ve removed those quotes since. The goal of this blog is not to savage strategy without putting a name to it.]
Republicans, not surprisingly, lept at the chance to play some offense on an issue their party had seemingly determined would have to be endured as a necessary political loss. “They just jumped the sharquester,” John Hart, a spokesman for Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (R), told the Washington Post Tuesday.
