GOP betting it all on Obamacare's failure
The guy who is in charge of keeping Republicans in charge of the House
says the GOP's plan is to make 2014 all about Obamacare:
Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, the House GOP campaign chief, said Friday that the midterm elections will be centered on Obamacare — what he called a “category 5 political hurricane.”
“This has become a real problem out there,” Walden told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “In terms of the political landscape, this is boiling right at the surface.”
First, nice try by Walden to keep up the "Obamacare is Obama's Katrina" meme
being pushed by former Bushies, but comparing Bush's indifferent and incompetent handling of Hurricane Katrina to the rocky rollout of a program that will provide affordable, quality health insurance to millions of Americans
is utterly absurd.
Second, Walden shouldn't get too cocky, because while it's probably true that Obamacare will be at the center of the 2014 elections, in the end he might not be all that happy that he got what he was wishing for. The two big problems with Obamacare right now are that the website is not working well and that some people are getting cancellation notices for existing plans before the insurance exchanges are running at full speed, so they can't see the full range of options available to them.
Those problems are real, both substantively and politically, but they are also solvable, and the fact that the administration is both acknowledging them and promising to fix them is a good sign. (Imagine if Obama had spent yesterday telling his healthcare.gov team that they had done a "heckuva job.")
Assuming the problems do get fixed, the 2014 Obamacare referendum will be between continuing a program that has given millions of uninsured Americans quality, affordable health insurance while strengthening protections for Americans who already had insurance, and going back to the way things were before Obamacare, when if you couldn't afford insurance, the ER was your only option, and when if you had a preexisting condition, insurers could deny you coverage, or even worse, could deny your claims even if you already had coverage.
If the problems don't get fixed and get worse, and the promise of Obamacare goes unfulfilled, there's no question that it will be a liability for Democrats. Duh. But as long as it works well enough to demonstrate that it's worth continuing to improve it, Obamacare will be here to stay, and the GOP's continued threats to repeal it will be the best GOTV message Democrats could hope for.