OK, who didn’t see this coming?
I mean, really. Who actually stayed up all night waiting to see if the federal government was going to be closed, thereby ushering in Armageddon? Seriously, did anyone doubt that a last-minute deal would be struck? Did anyone not know that all the doomsday predictions were just scare tactics used to position the combatants for partisan advantage?
Conservatives, of course, weren’t worried about a government shutdown; they were hoping for it. Alas, the realist in all of us knew it wasn’t likely.
In the end, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we got a hell of a lot more than we would have if not for Republicans regaining control of the House last fall. Now we go back for more. And if we regain control of both the Senate and the White House in 2012, we’ll get even more. This is how the game’s played. And it never ends.
The biggest winners in the deal: Parents of low-income students in perhaps the worst school district in the universe: the District of Columbia. A school voucher program that had been killed by Obama and congressional Democrats was re-established. Now if only we could establish a similar program for similar families all across the land.
So let it be written; so let it be done.
