Democrats to try 2010 Obamacare strategy in 2014.

Well, it’s not like they have many options left at this point:

Scarred by years of Republican attacks over Obamacare, with more in store next year, Democrats have settled on an unlikely strategy for the 2014 midterms: Bring it on.

Party strategists believe that embracing the polarizing law — especially its more popular elements — is smarter politics than fleeing from it in the House elections. The new tack is a marked shift from 2010, when Republicans pointed to Obamacare as Exhibit A of big government run amok on their way to seizing the House from Democrats.

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That’s… not precisely true, by the way. It’s sort of incomplete: while ‘big government run amok’ was certainly a central theme of the 2010 elections, it doesn’t explain why Republicans were able to capitalize on it. When you think about it, honestly, big government is not exactly a problem that only rises up when one party is in office. Both parties are guilty: in 2010, one party got spanked and the other got all of those wonderfully troublesome new legislators joining their ranks. Why is that?

It’s because the Democrats apparently have never really understood that the way that Obamacare was passed features prominently in the reason why it’s so unpopular among the rest of us. Politico’s vaguely revisionist history aside, the Democrats certainly attempted to tout Obamacare as being a net positive in the 2010 elections; what they failed to realize then – and, apparently, now – is that when you shove something down my throat, I don’t particularly care whether you think that it tastes great or not. What I care about is your callous indifference and unwarranted arrogance; and so it was with Obamacare. The Democrats ignored the opposition, ignored the populace, and even ignored the established rules to pass their walking monstrosity of a health care rationing system*; and it is a measure of precisely how tone-deaf they were about the procedure that one of their leaders actually thought that it was smart to tell people that we had to pass the bill to find out what was in it.

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But that’s the past; what’s happening in the present is that… Democrats apparently still think it’s all going to be OK if they can just somehow put the right spin on the results. If the Democratic party really wanted to get past Obamacare, then the Democrats whould be: admitting that they had acted abominably in passing Obamacare in the way that they did, and that the Members of Congress who got tossed out on their ears as a result deserved their fate; promising to support a veto-proof repeal of Obamacare, in exchange for the passage of mutually-acceptable and popular provisions; and publicly repudiating Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their horrifically flawed leadership.None of this will of course happen, which is equally of course the Democrats’ prerogative. But it also handily demonstrates to people just how invested the Democratic party is in this particular narrative of failure.

Such a pity.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Via


*By the way: no Republican voted for Obamacare. There is not a single GOP signature on the final bill. Not one. This is all the Democrats’ fault.

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