. . .

As an exercise in prospective benchmarking, I laid out in “The Situation” on Sept. 30 exactly what I thought a shutdown would need to accomplish in order to be worth doing, noting that “there’s more to this battle than health care funding, as important as that may be for tens of millions of people.”

The shutdown would “be costly but worthwhile,” I argued, “if congressional enactments are able to do more work both in compelling and in restraining the president after the shutdown fight than before.”

But there’s a catch, I also argued: You can’t play the game as a congressional minority party unless you’re willing to see it through:

If you’re going back down in 24, 48, or 72 hours, throw in the towel now before a shutdown even starts. Nothing is weaker than setting up a fight and then flinching from it as soon as it starts—though for some reason, this point never sticks to a man who earned the nickname TACO and has made a signature move out of setting a deadline and then blowing past it. But it will stick to congressional Democrats, life being unfair. Doing that is unfair to the men and women who will lose their jobs in the first several days of this shutdown. If you’re going to play this game, you have a moral obligation to win it.

. . .

By any reasonable standard, to put it simply, the Democratic tactics would have to be judged a total failure: They got nothing in exchange for the pain they inflicted. They went to war, with federal workers and recipients of government services bearing the risk of the battle, unprepared to do what it would take to win. They lacked the moral seriousness not to play at all if they weren’t going to have the fortitude to see the matter through.

. . .