Booman got it exactly right last week:

It is within the Republicans power to obstruct and, by doing so, make the president look weak and ineffectual. That’s the path they’ve chosen. However, the collateral damage has been enormous and the voters seem to have noticed. People now are much more likely to tell pollsters that they want to see the president take a confrontational tone with Republicans rather than cooperate with them. That plays right into Obama’s hands as he shifts to campaign mode.

Attending a community leadership training seminar last week, I heard a Republican city council member from Huntsville tell the room he was a Republican, but not a tea party Republican — and with exactly that kind of emphasis. Indeed, tea parties have huge and growing unfavorable ratings these days, as the public understands what lies behind the label is nothing new.

But is the House GOP leadership prepared to backpedal? Evidently not, and in part that is because tea party Republicans are the most engaged on these issues. It’s not that they’re unaware of the polling — take Eric Cantor, for instance, who recently told his caucus to avoid taking things to the brink again:

The message from the majority leader is an effort to prevent the kinds of fights over government spending that could lead to government shutdowns this fall if Congress cannot agree on legislation to fund the government. It suggests Republican leaders worry they could take a political hit if there is a government shutdown from voters already irritated over the contentious summer talks on raising the debt ceiling.

Instead, House Republicans want to use the crisis to pursue further ecocide and wage-destruction as “jobs bills:”

The Cantor memo provided additional details on the regulatory focus. The week of Sept. 12, House Republicans will try to overrule an NLRB ruling that restricts Boeing’s effort to transfer an assembly line from Washington state to South Carolina. Business leaders accuse the Obama administration of interfering to try to help their labor allies, because South Carolina is a right-to-work state with fewer unions. Labor leaders say the aerospace company is seeking a spot for cheaper labor. The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”

That is virtual boilerplate from the producerist manifesto. Coal ash regulations do not threaten anyone’s job, much less 100,000. On the other hand, Cantor’s party wants to kill transportation and infrastructure funding that supports hundreds of thousands of actual, real, not-imaginary jobs. If Cantor cared about the concrete industry, he would want to fully fund the maintenance and improvement of roads, bridges, and dams. But that’s not what he wants.

His goal, and that of his majority in the House, is to make sure the president cannot improve employment numbers before November of 2012. They don’t care how many of us are put out of work to accomplish that.

Whether or not Democrats, much less progressives, capitalize on this is another question altogether. I’m pretty sure the president plans on doing so as he “shifts to campaign mode,” because at this point he has every permission to go on the offensive.