Health, Death and Taxes

Yesterday marked the end for most of the primary elections across the country and now the surviving combatants can finally get around to savaging their opponents for office instead of just knifing their own party rivals. And they have just over 2 months to do it.

Whether Obama likes it or not, and he won’t, this General Election will not be just about the makeup of the House and Senate. It will be a referendum on him and his policies and his performance. Apart from spending trillions of dollars we don’t have and apart from appointing a whole raft of inexperienced and incompetent people to one office or another, he really has only one thing upon which to hang his hat.

And that one thing is ObamaCare which his congressional lackeys rammed through unread and which is seen by most thinking Americans as a disaster waiting in the wings. Now the GOP aren’t that stupid that they don’t read the tea leaves on this subject and so it is inevitable the issue will play a major role in the run-up to November 2.

Equally, the liberal strategists are not dumb either when it comes to clinging onto power. No, they reserve their stupidity in order to apply it in full to their policies when they do gain power.

And now we know how they plan to fight the inevitable. The message being drummed into liberal candidates around the country is “Improve’ health care, don’t talk cost” , but that is not wholly what is going on. What is going on is a recognition from the Democrats that after a year of trying to sell Obamacare as a panacea of right thinking and improvement, the voters headed to the polls in November disagree and are angry.

Consequently, the Democrats are abandoning all pretenses of selling Obamacare to the public and have cut and run back to “If you don’t replace us with the Republicans, we promise we will improve it.”

This strategy can only suggest that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. Instead, it is designed to win over a skeptical public, and to defend the legislation — and in particular the individual mandate — from a push for repeal.

The presentation provided to liberal candidates nationwide concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college-educated women and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly that many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House’s all-out communications effort.

Note just how bad it must be for the Democrats and their messaging if “many are unaware that Obamacare has passed.” This is consistent willful naivety by the Democrats. The public that will most likely vote does know Obamacare passed and they are mad as all get out because of it.

And the kicker — the revised talking points counsel that Democrats should avoid making the claim that Obamacare will reduce costs and cut the deficit.

In other words, the two main selling points are being tossed out the window.

And now it's time to start tossing out the perpetrators starting in just 69 days.