Did the Republicans get their butt kicked by shutting down the government and delaying the debt increase last month? On substance, Republicans in fact won, although there is a lurking danger in the budget settlement that could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The real issue for the Democrats has always been the sequester. As the Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb noted “Democrats hate the sequester because it’s basically the opposite of their vision of domestic investment” where the government experts know best how to allocate society’s resources. At the beginning of the year, President Barack Obama, Senate Leader Harry Reid, and House minority boss Nancy Pelosi all set reversing the sequester spending cuts as Democrats’ top priority. Reid was especially incensed and even blamed the president and himself for being “too lenient” in being suckered into the deal in 2011 and this time won a pledge from Obama to keep the White House out of the negotiations.

With Obama president for three more years and the Senate still under Democratic control, Reid held the whip hand. What could conventional Republicans do? With the president refusing to bargain at all, what would have happened if the Tea Party backbenchers in the Senate and House had not gone ahead with the shutdown and debt threats? The whole focus of this year’s debate would have been on overturning the sequester and how the evil Republicans were punishing the poor by refusing to do so, reprising the winning theme used successfully against Mitt Romney. The compliant mainstream media would have happily picked up their favorite theme for their favorite politicians and made the Republicans look just as bad as they actually did on the shutdown. The polls would have ended exactly the same, only the spending cuts would be gone.

To argue that the Republicans should have taken a more “positive” approach is to tell them to surrender. There is no way Republicans can change the fact that the mainstream media are in love with President Obama and will believe anything he says or that’s parroted by his acolytes. The only strong point against the Tea Party strategy is that while the Obamacare kick-off was so awful the media could not ignore it, the shutdown/debt news did step on the story line. On the other hand, the media are still accepting the Obama con that Obamacare will all work out well in the long run—and a sequester fight would have stepped on the story line too.

There is no peace in the political worlds of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. Republican moderates are constantly recommending concessions when the left will have none of it. Conventional Republicans just cannot understand that the other guys are determined and will demand unconditional surrender unless there is some push back. Sure, the Tea Party conservatives have been rash, but if they were not they would have been ignored and their one success would have been overturned. There is no way to win the middle moderates in the electorate at this stage of a fight. This will be remembered in 2016 or even 2014 only if Republicans allow it.

The looming problem in the compromise that passed Congress is a joint budget committee to recommend by December 13 a plan to avoid the next shutdown on January 15. It is chaired by Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan. At their first meeting—surprise!—Democrat Murray said her top priority was “to replace some of the damaging sequester.” Many Republicans do not like the sequester either since they think it cuts defense too much. Ryan’s fame is based on his desire for entitlement reform. The Wall Street Journal has editorialized that “easing” the sequester would be a good trade for getting even very small entitlement changes. That deal is the talk of Washington today. Reid has laid a marvelous trap to get his top priority.

Conservatives may have problems with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, but he seems to understand the larger battle. When Reid demanded sequester changes as his price to end the standoff, McConnell replied that the sequester had produced the first reductions in government spending in decades, now for two years in a row and heading for a third, and there was no way Republicans should trade away their only success. For conservatives, preserving and extending that one victory must be the top goal and nothing else must be allowed to get in the way.

And do not worry too much about government shutdowns and spending cuts. We had plenty of both during my time as Ronald Reagan’s civil service director, with the same media roar, and we won by a landslide in the next election followed by 25 years of prosperity thereafter.

Donald Devine is senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Personnel Management during his first term.