"Back home for the August recess, rank-and-file Democratic Members of the House are facing a backlash from their constituents, who are already fed up with Washington's job-killing agenda and don't support Democrats' government takeover of health care," says a press release posted on Boehner's official blog.The problem is that, in con game parlance, they cracked out of turn by letting the memo asking the teabaggers to do this stuff surface. Now Democrats are going to be able to dismiss them with ease. If anything, it will harden Democrats' resolve to pass something closer to what's being debated, as this sort of chicanery will only discredit more reasonable critics of the Democrats' plan by associating them in members' and the media's mind with teabag mobs. Then again, we've never seen anything to suggest that Boehner's venality encompassed any sort of tactical brilliance--unlike Tom DeLay, for example--so this is what you get.
In fact, just when I was thinking up this blog post, I noticed that this reaction is already happening. I realize that Republicans are desperate to stop Obama's health care policy from becoming law, but there are smarter ways of doing it.
