This Reuters article is fascinating reading, not least because it’s a hoot. Executive summary: Barack Obama and the Democrats’ call to run on Obamacare will be tested in New Hampshire… where people hate it, and both the Senator and two Representatives up for re-election this year are currently in deep trouble over the law and things aren’t improving for any of them*.

Let me drill down on this, with ‘this’ being the reaction of local voter Derek Gagnon:

Gagnon’s distaste for the individual mandate dovetails with a principal line of conservative attacks nationally on the law.

‘Dovetails’ is a subtly wrong word: it implies that Gagnon’s opinion just happened to mesh well with national conservative arguments on Obamacare.  I understand why Reuters might be unwilling to fully admit that the GOP has spent the last four years effectively getting its message out and that the Democrats have not, but that’s what happened. The law was so disastrous that no Republican dared put his or her signature on the final version, and we’ve been saying why since then. Put another way: the phrase that Reuters should have used was ‘was informed by a principal,’ etc, etc, etc. It would be more accurate.

I’ll leave the reader with this thought: today is May 11th.  The election is less than six months away at this point. Notably absent from the article is any indication that the Democratic party is about to unleash a pro-Obamacare media blitz on New Hampshire – or, in fact, anywhere else.  I admit to a certain amount of curiosity as to when the Democrats were planning to actually start campaigning on this issue…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Reuters’ admission here is truly arch: “Brown has been rising in the polls against Shaheen. But she was ahead 45 to 39 percent in a recent WMUR-Granite State poll.” Unlike Reuters, I’m capable of linking to the recent Brown/Shaheen polls: note that the above poll shows a +4 movement towards Brown in the last three months.  Also: 45-reelect is a freaking bad number for a sitting Senator to have, particularly in a sixth-year election cycle.  Lastly: Jeanne Shaheen is still, in fact, ahead.  She’s just doing a lot worse now than she had been doing.