The Sequester is an Indicator of Political Relevance

During the Vietnam War the members of the SDS and fellow travelers would pose the question, what if we declared war and no one showed up? Supposedly that was to be thought provoking but thinking didn't run too deeply in those days so it was just filed away with the peace symbol and the Che Guevara posters. As laughable as that question seems in a way a class war was declared to have been waged and yet no one showed up. We were told, and are still told, that the sequester would evoke the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the 60's yet instead of flocking to the barricades with molotov cocktails in hand the public merely yawns. It may well be Obama's worst idea. What does it say when the programs so dear to the political class are cut and will be cut even more deeply in the future and no one gives a damn? It says that those programs are a patent waste of money. It also says that the Beltway crowd so desperate to fund costly programs that no one wants are so far behind they think they're first. They, like their cherished programs, are both irrelevant and obsolete.
If you can forgive a surd quote from John Maynard Keynes;

...but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.

In other words the thinking that prevails in Washington today was cutting edge when in 1970, at age 30, Harry Reid was elected Lieutenant Governor of Nevada and Nancy Pelosi was a San Francisco housewife. As the Supreme Court pointed out in the last term when it struck down part of the Voting Rights Act; things have changed in the past 50 years. Yet the thinking has not. It is remarkable that the minimum wage, a New Deal concept that has been debunked by every reputable economist since, is a hot political topic for those living in the past. Any discussion relative to raising the Social Security retirement age is dismissed out of hand notwithstanding the fact that life expectancy has increased to the point that many will spend a quarter of their lives in retirement drawing benefits and not contributing to the fund for future retirees. The sacred cows of the New Deal and its ideological successor, the Great Society, have been milked dry yet one suspects Washington insiders still view Pittsburgh as a steel town and California as model for the country to emulate. Obama is especially challenged as he seems to have  absorbed and held every archaic ideology his mother force fed him, from his father's anti colonialism to her own neo Marxism.
By accident, rather than design, the sequester is an indicator of political relevance. If no one cries about a budget cut except the politicians and the bureaucrat that's all the more reason to cut deeper and if a somewhat diminished national defense is necessary to rein in military adventures and the cold warriors of years past then so be it.