The party's over.
Here's what we haven't seen during this August recess: irate townhall meetings about Obamacare. Remember 2010 and 2012 and the astroturf-driven month of rage? This August, there's hardly a peep. And it's not just in public meetings. It's not the
issue this year that it was, if you can judge by press releases.
Last summer, lawmakers churned out news releases using the term Obamacare, 530 of them in June, July and August.
This summer? 138.
Those press releases are the core of what lawmakers are running their campaigns on, what they're fundraising off of. And this year, it's not so much Obamacare. There's good reason for that. For many people, the law is working. And faced with that reality, Republicans are
reduced to gibberish when forced to actually talk about it. The law is still polling poorly, but that's mostly now out of habit. The white-hot hatred and fear over it has subsided, now that it's clear that it didn't mean the end of the world.