Suck it up and move on, Republicans.
Whether or not your real reason for throwing a million folks out of work and hamstringing the Federal government was to keep Middle-class and Working-class Americans from obtaining affordable health care--whether or not that was the driving goal of the billionaires who fund your wretched political action committees--you failed.
And we know that denying health care to Americans may just have been a fig leaf draped over your broader goal of forcibly violating the American Constitutional system of government you had the misfortune to be born into, but let's assume for the sake of argument you're telling the truth for once.
As Paul Krugman says, in so many words: You blew it.
From yesterday, this column is notable both for what it says, and what it doesn't say. While Krugman talks about the reasons he believes the Affordable Health Care Act will succeed, in spite of every effort of your Party, the flip side of his argument, left mostly unstated, is why your effort failed.
[T]his confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.
While your phony news outlets
gamely struggle to convince their deluded viewers that the Affordable Care Act crashed and burned from the get-go...it really didn't, did it?
[T]he glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected. And this means that one big worry of Obamacare supporters — that not enough people knew about the program, so that many eligible Americans would fail to sign up — is receding fast.
By March 31st, 2014, when enrollment for the year closes, millions will have signed onto what you so cleverly, so derisively labelled "Obamacare" and spent five years vilifying, demonizing, and otherwise lying to the country about. Those computer glitches? The guiding, invisible hand of that free market you cherish so much will have fixed them. Ain't that a bitch?
And do you really think the young, uninsured people who you're trying to reach with your lame advertisements will pay the slightest bit of attention to you?
Bear in mind that conservative groups have been spending heavily — and making some seriously creepy ads — in an effort to dissuade young people from signing up for insurance. Nonetheless, insurance companies are betting that young people will, in fact, sign up, as shown by the unexpectedly low premiums they’re offering for next year.
And the insurers are probably right. To see why anti-Obamacare messaging is probably doomed to fail, think about whom we’re talking about here. That is, who are the healthy uninsured individuals the program needs to reach? Well, they’re by and large not affluent, because affluent young people tend to get jobs with health coverage. And they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
Your efforts to influence this demographic will fail, because you're just not equipped--in any sense--to deal with this demographic. The 2012 election showed us that. Your policies don't have enough appeal to impress your own children. You can't connect with Blacks or Hispanics either. You are trapped in your own aging, white, conservative bubble. The folks hearing your message in that bubble are just not the ones you need to reach.
In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out.
They don't care what you say.
They're not listening to you.
Why don't they listen? They don't trust you.
So...what went wrong? How did you blow this so badly?
Maybe if your golden boy hadn't tried to govern from the hard right after a bitterly contested national election that tore at the very heart of the country, you might have made it.
Maybe if your party hadn't used the worst attack on American soil as an excuse to implement even more of your selfish ideology, you might have made it.
Maybe if you hadn't then invented the reasons to launch a pointless war that sapped the American spirit, you might have made it.
Maybe if you had shown the slightest bit of concern to the folks drowning in the New Orleans Parishes, you might have made it.
Maybe if you hadn't run that halfwit from Alaska on your 2008 ticket, you might have made it.
Maybe if you hadn't put your trust in a detached plutocrat on the heels of the worst economic debacle in memory (one that your policies caused), you might have made it.
Maybe if you had run Congressional candidates who didn't wear their hatred of women, African-Americans, Latinos and Hispanics on their sleeves, you might have made it.
Maybe if your House passed a single piece of legislation actually benefitting the American people, you might have made it.
But instead, you blew it. Americans don't trust what you do is going to help them. They don't trust you have their interests at heart. When they heard your rhetoric about the health care act, they went to see for themselves. And again, they found out you were wrong.
Now the Affordable Health Care is going to be the law of the land, for as long as you're still around.
Sorry about that.
Maybe you can take some solace in this old film clip from the 1960's: