WASHINGTON - If the latest Washington showdown over taxing and spending were a TV show, new programming might be in the future.

Maybe members of the public can accept $85 billion in sudden spending cuts. Maybe they assume Democrats and Republicans will just engineer a stopgap solution to cut short the sequester. Perhaps they think the doomsday scenarios of sequestration-related economic devastation from coast to coast envisioned by some politicians are overhyped.

Whatever the reason, this time, the budget brinkmanship that has come to define most of the past two years doesn’t seem to carry the same drama as earlier encounters over the debt ceiling, a government shutdown and an array of expiring tax cuts.

Constituents are calling with concerns, but few are clear on what they support or oppose, said Adam Sarvana, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.

“Unlike the last debt-ceiling fight, this has not generated the same depth of political feeling,” he said.

U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., said public reaction has been muted in his district, as well.

“My instinct is folks on the right and the left understand a lot of the hysteria around this is political theater,” he said. “We held a town hall last week, and I thought it would be about sequestration. Almost nothing. Even for the leftist activists ... they pretty much shook their heads and said it was absurd.”

The sequester is only the latest in a string of fiscal fights in Washington. It begins a nine-year, $1.2 trillion plan to cut spending. By comparison, two previous fights over raising the debt ceiling risked leaving the government unable to pay the bills it had already incurred. The “fiscal cliff” mainly involved a fight over whether to allow certain tax cuts to expire.

Meanwhile, the government is using temporary budget extensions because it has been unable to agree on a formal spending plan.

Public polling suggests the public has less interest in the consequences of the sequester that began Friday than it has had in previous fiscal skirmishes.

In August 2011, on the eve of a government shutdown and possible default, a poll by the New York Times and CBS News indicated that 34 percent of the public was following the issue very closely, while 14 percent of those polled said that they weren’t following it too closely. By comparison, a Washington Post-Pew poll taken a week before the sequester began indicated that 25 percent were following the story very closely and that 29 percent weren’t following it at all.

This week, a USA Today-Pew poll said that 49 percent of the public wanted to delay it if there was no other agreement but that 40 percent supported the sequester and 11 percent had no opinion.

“During the 2011 (debt ceiling) crisis, the public was not only engaged, but there was a certain outrage that was pretty evident in our polls,” said Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Research Center.

After Obama and congressional Republicans reached an agreement, those polled most commonly described the affair as “stupid,” “childish” and “disgusting,” he said.

After the 2012 fiscal cliff was averted, the public was again critical of the final deal, which made permanent the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for those earning less than $400,000 but reverted to the higher Bill Clinton-era rates for those making more. Now, many seem willing to accept the bad medicine many economists predict from the sequester.

“With each successive crisis, there is a little fatigue with this,” Doherty said. “It’s become the way Washington operates now. It’s not to say they don’t see a downside. We have 60 percent saying it’s going to have a major impact on the economy and 62 percent saying that impact will be negative. But, in this case, there seems to be an air of resignation.”

That mood isn’t as pervasive in the Tucson area, which figures to feel the brunt of defense cuts in Arizona this year. U.S. Rep. Ron Barber, D-Ariz., whose district includes two military bases and multiple defense contractors, said many of his constituents are asking him to help stop the sequester.

“One of my constituents described what we did (with sequestration) in a way I think was very apt. He said when Congress approved sequestration, they built a nuclear bomb, which it never intended to explode. ... And now, here we are. ... It’s simply unacceptable we got to this irresponsible point,” Barber said.

Elsewhere, one reason cited for the collective shrug is the slow-motion nature of the sequester’s impact. For one, the full $1.2 trillion in scheduled spending cuts are spread across nine years. Even the $85 billion this year starts slowly, with most furloughs deferred until April or later.

“Optically and in reality, it’s not the same thing as a wholesale shutdown of the government,” said William Galston, a senior fellow on governance studies with the Brookings Institution. “And it’s certainly not the same thing as jeopardizing the full faith and credit of the United States of America, so the people are right to judge this less significant. People are in such a distrusting mood that I don’t think they’re going to believe anything a politician says about the sequester.”

The “amorphous” nature of the sequester, with its specific effects a mystery even to members of Congress, has contributed to the quieter public mood, Sarvana said. “They don’t know what the real impact will be. They call us looking for answers, and we try to help,” he said. “But we don’t know exactly what will happen on an agency-by-agency basis.”

Investors, perhaps more in sync with those who see the spending cuts as a way of trimming future debt, seemed to take the sequester in stride, as well.

On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all ended on an upswing, despite warnings by the International Monetary Fund that the sequester would cause it to reconsider global economic forecasts.

Galston said members of the public likely won’t weigh in more forcefully on the sequester until they can tangibly feel it through things like overly long lines at airports. During the government shutdown of 1995, the public could see, for example, that national parks were closed, he added.

“It had an immediate impact,” he said “If something that’s supposed to be there is not there, that’s a big difference.”

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