Watching Rachel last night, she had a segment about "What happens next" with regards to the ACA. She showed a highlight of the President's remarks. The first words out of his mouth after the Court upheld the ACA. She made an interesting observation: The President sounded like a COMMERCIAL.
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As Rachel tells us, we have a GOLDEN opportunity to rewrite history. Time CAN be rewritten. We all know that people love the benefits of the ACA. We also know that Republicans and their masters will be spending over a billion dollars to get people to elect them so they can repeal it.
Our job is to make the idea of repeal so repugnant that any Republican who talks about "repeal" automatically loses 5-10 points in his polling.
And don't trust the administration, either. That worked so well in 2010. Now, the ACA DOES mandate HHS to spend money on public information spots about the ACA. And in fact, they've just signed a 20 million dollar contract for such a campaign.
But still. 20 million against over 250 million. We are still at a disadvantage. Especially with the natural tendency of Democrats to cringe every time the word "tax" is mentioned. We've seen a preview of the Republican attack. And you can damn well bet that EVERY commercial in EVERY race from here on in will be about "Obama's massive tax increase on the middle class".
EVERY. ONE.
Now is NOT the time to run from it. Now is the time, according to John Cole at Balloon Juice, to go in for the flawless victory:
Keep pressing the advantage, keep talking about the benefits that consumers will experience under the law, keep mocking the “socialism” and “unconstitutional” claims, and keep moving forward. Remember, this is easy turf. A couple years ago Republicans were arguing that crushing a child’s testicles was constitutional. Now they want to argue that denying your child health care when he has leukemia is constitutional. Go in for the fucking kill, liberals.
For once in your god damned lives, put aside your fucking stupid beliefs about purity and how the public option was the bestest thing since sliced bread, accept the massive, game-changing victory you got today, and use it as a god damned bludgeon against the troglodytes whose health care plans are modeled after Ebeneezer Scrooge
Don’t argue amongst yourselves about what would have been better- smash the Republicans around the head and neck with the cudgel you have been given. We’re not debating which Democratic plan would have been better, we’re debating the reality of what we have now versus the 18th century version of what Republicans would replace it with.
We ALL know that the ACA is only a first step. We ALL know that this is an imperfect law. We ALL know this. But as Michael Moore said on The Last Word, we so seldom get to celebrate victories that we should celebrate even an imperfect one. And once Democrats and the President are re-elected, once the benefits really kick in, then we begin work to make the Affordable Care Act better.
And as the President has said:
"Implement and Improve".
The real work starts now.
7:10 AM PT: And here's something we can do RIGHT NOW: The first rebate checks are going out. We need to make DAMN sure that these people know who's responsible for these checks. This would be a killer TV ad campaign. So all you who have connections, let's get an ad out there!