"Going down, please."
Greg Sargent
reports that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is launching a campaign going after Republicans for offering nothing on health care reform except for repeatedly proposing to repeal Obamacare, a position it will call "Cruz Care":
The “Cruz Care” campaign is grounded in a conviction that Republicans — and not a few D.C. pundits — are misreading public opinion on Obamacare. Dems believe that despite the law’s unpopularity, many voters don’t view the health care issue as a zero sum decision over whether Obamacare is good or bad. Rather, they can be persuaded to see this as choice — between fixing an admittedly imperfect reform and giving it a chance to work, and the GOP alternative, which is essentially to go back to the old system, where junk insurance and a lack of standards ”exposed people to financial and medical calamity.”
This goes back to the question of whether elections are referendums or choices: 2012 was clearly a choice election, but 2010 was a referendum election. Then as now, polls showed that most voters want to keep and strengthen Obamacare instead of repealing it, but 2014 differs from 2010 in one key respect: Obamacare won't be just a piece of paper, it will be real program delivering tangible benefits to millions of Americans.
Obviously, if the administration's implementation of the law doesn't improve, the political equation won't be pretty for Democrats, but assuming that it does, it's equally obvious that Republicans will be in trouble, because their only response to Obamacare is to repeal it. Republicans are clearly rooting for it to fail, but most Americans want Obamacare to work—a new CBS poll today showed that even as public frustration with the law's implementation is at it's peak, most people don't want to repeal it, they want to keep it in place and make it work better.
Combine the lack of enthusiasm for repeal with the fact that things are already starting to get better, there's reason to be optimistic not just that the political climate will improve for Democrats by next November, but more importantly, that the promise of Obamacare—affordable, quality health care insurance for all Americans—can still become a reality.
