Dems say calling it a ‘slowdown’ won’t help GOP message

They can call it twinkletoes or whatever they want, the people still understand it’s a shutdown. Nice to see the Dems taking the messaging on though.

Conservatives are turning to a new message in the escalating budget fight: A government shutdown is not actually a shutdown.

It’s a “slowdown,” according to the new refrain from Tea Party leader Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). Or as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) put it on Monday, the stalemate over spending could cause the government “to partially shut down.”

The rhetorical distinction is a subtle, but politically significant, shift in the intensifying blame game between Republicans and Democrats, who must reach agreement and pass a spending bill by April 8 to avert what is commonly referred to as a government shutdown.

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“Calling it New Coke didn’t make it taste better, and trying to change the name of Speaker [John] Boehner’s [R-Ohio] government shutdown won’t make it hurt middle-class families and seniors any less,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republicans are not uniformly avoiding the word “shutdown,” but the qualifiers that have cropped up in recent days suggest they are taking their cues from conservative and Tea Party activists, who for weeks have argued that a government shutdown is a misnomer because so many essential services would keep running in the absence of a budget agreement.