The numbers (Update on Mondale and Dukakis)

Shutdown. Obamacare. This is a situation in which the polls matter. So here are the numbers:

By 72 percent to 22 percent, Americans oppose Congress “shutting down major activities of the federal government” as a way to stop the Affordable Care Act from going into effect, the national survey from Quinnipiac University found.

By 64 percent to 27 percent, voters don’t want Congress to block an increase in the nation’s $16.7 trillion federal borrowing limit as a way to thwart implementation of the health-care law, which Obama signed into law in 2010 with a goal of insuring millions of Americans, known as “Obamacare.”

A majority of the public, 58 percent, is opposed to cutting off funding for the insurance program that begins enrollment today. Thirty-four percent support defunding it.

Why are the Republicans slitting their own throats? They live in such an insular media world, I think they really believe that the people are on their side. They bought into their own black propaganda.

No matter how many times people like Mitch McConnell tell us that the shutdown is the fault of the administration, everyone knows that this is all about Republican refusal to tolerate Obamacare.

We also know that the 2012 election was fought, to a large degree, over the issue of Obamacare. Romney lost; Obama won. End of story.

If Obamacare turns out to be a terrible program, the people will vote for representatives who will scrap it in favor of the old system. That's the way democracy is supposed to work.

By the way: I generally like what Joe Nocera says here. But then we get to the end... 

A party controlled by its most extreme faction will ultimately be forced back to the center. The Democrats learned that when Walter Mondale was losing to Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis to George H.W. Bush. Now it is the Republicans who don’t seem to understand that their extreme tactics are pleasing a small percentage of their countrymen but alienating everyone else.

Are you freakin' kidding me? Have the historical rewriters been so successful that this generation sees Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis as radicals? Are you telling me that those guys are supposed to be the lefty equivalent of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul?

In 1984 and 1988, the real lefties supported Jesse Jackson. They -- should I say we? -- considered Mondale and Dukakis to be squishy centrists. Even Gary Hart was considered a truer liberal.

And now they want to brainwash our kids into believing that Mondale was Marx and Dukakis was Engels. Yeesh. If we can't sort out what happened in the (near) past, we'll never figure out how to fix the present.

UPDATE: A reader directs our attention to this column by Charles Pierce which makes the same point about the Nocera piece. Pierce:

Mondale was a run-of-the-mill New Deal Democrat who'd been vice-president to Jimmy Carter, a technocratic centrist in the mold of, well, of Michael Dukakis, whom nobody ever confused with Henry Wallace. Neither man was even the "most extreme" -- which, in this case, apparently means, "furthest left" -- candidate in the primary fields that produced them. In Mondale's case, that would have been Jesse Jackson, who also was around to run against Dukakis, as were Dick Gephardt and Paul Simon, both of them demonstrably more liberal than Dukakis was. Mondale lost to Reagan because Reagan was a popular incumbent.

You know who else did surprisingly well in the early stages of the '84 primaries? George McGovern. That's right. A guy whom all the pundits considered damaged goods made an appeal during the first debate of the season: Vote your conscience by voting for me. I may not win, but the winner will know what you stand for. And everyone was surprised by how many people did, in fact, vote for him.