Not only because he's an out of touch old guard loser, but it is very clear at this point that he cannot control his people.
The whole shutdown stare down gambit turns on your party's internal discipline. You ...
(a) either don't get into this kind of contest in the first place (coz you're dealing with psychopaths, and also maybe you should not actually shield the American people from the pain that the party they voted for is determined to bring on them, so that maybe they finally understand that Republicans are really as bad as Democrats say they are?),
(b) or you get into it and build tolerance for pain, work on your messaging (now, that's a joke) and wait for the inevitable pressure points to start showing the cracks on the other side's front, and forgodssakes, just hold the damn line in the meantime,
(c) or ... if you're really going to fold because you absolutely miscalculated in the beginning (for which, heads should roll among the leadership class that got them into this mess in the first place) then you fold as a whole, as a single front and build a new message around that (now that's another joke).
What you don't do is to succumb to a handful of senators (who are bought and paid for by god knows who) to dictate the outcome. Especially *not* after a huge victory at the ballot box with Trump himself feeling the pressure, blaming the shutdown for the loss, and talking about the nuclear option on the filibuster, while at the same time, air traffic issues are beginning to pile up with Thanksgiving around the corner, which is one of the handful of things that Republicans would be more receptive to (because unlike SNAP benefits and the ACA, air traffic actually impacts rich people) as long as you're ready to roll out the message that Republican transience and cruelty on the ACA is what killed Thanksgiving this year (yeah, that's a joke too). At the end of the day, this was the absolute worst time to fold.
I guess the good thing is we're going to be right at this same spot on January. We'll see if this is still a party that can find remnants of a long atrophied backbone they need to find somehow if they want to be an effective partner in the opposition against Trump's entrenching authoritarianism.
The first step is taking the senate leadership away from Schumer, who's been a disaster on every front, and give it to someone who can hold the coalition together and not be outplayed by everyone at the table at every turn. Who's that? No idea. I just hope that he's not replaced by one of the eight senators that stabbed the party in the back for some dubious short term gain. But given that we're dealing with the Democratic Party here, I'm not placing any bets against that being the case. You can always count on the Democrats to bungle it up.