To Republicans looking for a pick-me-up in the coming week of budget crisis, we recommend MSNBC, where we caught a broadcast featuring the network’s Alex Wagner complaining about how, even as the GOP is allegedly losing popularity, the ground is shifting. She put the question to the editor of the Nation magazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel, by suggesting that the question of sequestration has been sidelined and “the goalposts have decidedly been moved to the right.” Ms. vanden Heuvel agreed. It’s almost, she suggested, that “Paul Ryan’s numbers have become the centrist number.”

Apparently what touched off this alarm was Congressman Ryan’s oped piece in the Wall Street Journal sketching a way to end the stalemate. It was a shrewd piece, which was bad enough for the MSNBC panelists, but the fact that it was, as Ms. Wagner put it, “endorsed” by the Washignton Post had them particularly upset. They lay aside the notion that reopening the government is a concession, as one panelist put it, “What exactly are they giving? All we’ve heard from Paul Ryan is a shorter, less kind of nutso wish list of things, not defunding Obamacare but we’ll cut Medicare.”

We wouldn’t want to make too much of this kind of thing. But we wouldn’t want to let the point pass, either. The uniformity of opinion that the shutdown of the government is a) the fault of the Republicans and b) will count against the party in the coming election fails to resnoate with us. But even if it turns out to be the case, we keep thinking of Reagan’s famous dictum about how there’s no limit to what one can accomplish if one doesn’t care who gets the credit. We mean no discredit to the radicals in the party when we suggest that if the net result of all this is that Paul Ryan advances to the center of the policy debate, that in and of itself is a kind of victory.