It’s no secret why Republicans are facing a PR debacle over the shutdown they triggered. Not only have conservatives chosen an unpopular issue on which to make a stand—polls consistently show that Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a fairly wide margin. The Tea Partiers have exacerbated the problem by choosing a massively unpopular approach to getting their way. The latest Quinnipiac poll finds that voters object to defunding Obamacare under threat of shutdown by a yawning 50-point margin. (In fairness, an earlier CNBC poll put the margin at a mere 41 points.)

In retrospect, Republicans had exactly one hope for weathering the shutdown fight: turning it into a debate on the merits of Obamacare (as opposed to the merits of defunding Obamacare). That’s the one aspect of this confrontation where they hold an advantage, since more Americans oppose the president’s health care law than favor it. And, as luck would have it for the GOP, the central feature of the law went online Tuesday morning, at the precise moment the lights were going out on the federal government. The conservative media apparatus had already been planning round-the-clock coverage of the inevitable Obamacare glitches. If they could goad Democrats into a defense of Obamacare—a defense the White House had itself planned—they might drown out the otherwise brutal shutdown coverage and ward off disastrous infighting.

As if one cue, Obamacare stories led The Drudge Report (“Happy Obamacare Day!” “What a Mess!”) all day on Tuesday. Breitbart flooded the zone with news of Obamacare glitches. National Review Online welcomed readers with a detailed anti-Obamacare editorial. Discussion of the shutdown barely cracked their sites.

But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. While the White House did move ahead with its planned Obamacare defense, featuring the president flanked by a tableau of sympathetic Americans, it wisely sandwiched the event between denunciations of Republican hostage-taking tactics. This, in turn, made it extremely difficult to pretend there wasn’t a Republican-instigated crisis at hand, even for a quasi-news organization of dodgy legitimacy prone to selectively covering national politics.

By which I of course mean Fox News. Watching Fox on Tuesday inspired that rubber-necking impulse you typically only get when a Fox anchor is forced to pronounce a foreign-sounding name (or is dressed down by a Republican they thought was sympathetic … usually over something foreign-sounding). Fox was all ready to go with its Obamacare set pieces—overburdened websites, 800-number backlogs. And it dutifully looped them into its coverage. But given its investment in the appearance of keeping viewers informed, it couldn’t exactly go AWOL on the biggest political story of the year. Instead it spent the day flailing.